When you watch the trailer for “The Princess”, you may think this movie is derivative feminist garbage that would never be released in movie theaters and you would be right.
22 year old Joey King, who’s probably about 5 ft 2 and 110 pounds soaking wet beating up on guys four times her size in hand to hand combat with Joan Jett playing in the background. Despite the awful trailer, I thought maybe this could be something that could be so bad as actually good. Maybe there was a chance that this film could be a little more camp than the trailer let on. I was hoping that there was more to it than the awful trailer and after watching this movie I realize that I was wrong.
“The Princess” is a story about a princess who is locked up in the castle surrounded by guards. But little do the guards know, that our princess is actually a butt kicking bad ass who has the power to mop the floor with every single one of them at ease. The princess wants to be the heir to her family’s throne but she’s a woman and that right is reserved for a man. The princess struggles to convince her father that she is the rightful heir but due to sexist attitudes, she has to stay in the background and wait. However, now that her family has been kidnapped, she is the only one that can save the day and save the kingdom.
The downside to the endless supply of streaming services is the fact that studios now have carte blanche to essentially create an endless supply of mediocre films that would never be released in theaters. The princess is a film that would never see the light of day in the movie theater and Disney knows it.
All of the progressive tropes of filmmaking are here. All men are bad, all women are great, the women can only be defeated by other women, and your endless supply of girl power. Now maybe this film could have worked with a different actress at the helm but Joey King is the absolute worst choice for this movie. King doesn’t even look physically strong enough to throw a chair above her head but she’s single handily beating up the guys four times their size in hand-to-hand combat. Why? She trained in the art of Kung Fu with her Asian Sensei who’s also Woman by the way.
If you didn’t like Joey King and all those Kissing Booth movies from Netflix, you’re going to like her even less here. This movie needed to be campy, it needs to be cartoonish because there’s no way you could take a film like this seriously. The problem is the film wants you to take it seriously. Le-Van Kiet is a Vietnamese director who has worked on plenty of Asian action films over the years, as a result the stunt choreography actually look pretty decent.
That’s really the only positive that you can say about this film. “The Princess” is the textbook definition of low expectations. Hire a couple of writers who haven’t done anything of note and give them a film that nobody really cares about because it is only going to sit and rot on a streaming service that is a small footnote in Disney’s overall portfolio.
If you’re one of those people who saw the trailer to this film and asked yourself is “The Princess” as bad as you think? The simple answer is Yes.
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