filM

A silly place

A modern-day bullied kid pulls a sword out of a stone and is tasked with saving the world in The Kid Who Would Be King, writer-director Joe Cornish’s attempt to capture the youthful, magical wonder of Harry Potter and mix it with the legend of King Arthur.

While he doesn’t completely fail, an overall drab directorial style, messy action and many moments that are far less clever than they think they are keep this action-adventure from being a true crowd-pleaser. This one will probably work better on a smaller screen, so wait until it’s streaming.

Do that, and you’ll catch a pretty good performance from Louis Ashbourne Serkis (son of Andy) as British school kid Alex, the fed-up boy who sticks his neck on the line to protect best bud Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) from bully Lance (Tom Taylor). Serkis is a little overwrought in some of the film’s more emotionally demanding parts, but he hits the right notes when it comes to Alex’s heroic proclamations after he procures Excalibur from a big rock in the middle of a construction site.

Alex happens to notice that Bedders sounds a lot like Bedivere, and Lance is short for Lancelot, so he figures destiny requires him to knight the two, along with Kaye (Rhianna Dorris), Lance’s partner in crime. They form an unlikely alliance against Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson), banished half-sister of King Arthur who will return in flying dragon lady form and make England the hub for the apocalypse.

Looking a little lost with wild hair and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, Patrick Stewart has a few scenes as an aged version of Merlin. He gives his few moments a fun, goofy touch, but he feels more like a guest star than a real player. For the most part, Merlin appears in the form of a teenager (Angus Imrie)—and an owl whenever he sneezes. When you add up all the different versions of Merlin, he fails to be a captivating, unified character. He’s just sort of odd.

Cornish, whose lone previous feature directorial credit was the low-budget Attack the Block (2011), allegedly procured a $59 million budget for this one, considerably more than the $13 million he got for the prior film. While he showed a scrappy ingenuity in Block, King actually winds up looking like it cost less money to make. The special effects are messy, the action is haphazard, and the overall palette of the film is surprisingly dull for what’s supposed to be a sprightly adventure.

Ferguson, so good in the Mission: Impossible movies, like Stewart, gets little opportunity to really make a mark as the villain. When she’s fully transformed into her dragon lady persona, it looks a little bit like Ray Harryhausen’s stopmotion Medusa from Clash of the Titans, but not enough for me to actually say it’s cool. It’s just derivative and sketchy.

I will say there are worse movies for your kids to see. There’s a good central message about making nice with your classmates and banding together to accomplish things. There’s also a sweet, semi-moving element involving Alex’s single mom and his missing father. Cornish might do well with a low-key family drama somewhere along the line rather than sped-up action adventures. He does all right with the humanity stuff.

It’s when he tries to do the magical things that The Kid Who Would Be King falls flat. It’s a muddled attempt at a new franchise in a postHarry Potter world. (Don’t get me started on those shitty Fantastic Beasts movies.) I suspect this one won’t be getting any sequels. Ω

“i’m sorry son, you can’t take your sword to school.”

The Kid Who Would Be King 12345

1Aquaman The latest DC effort, Aquaman, is middling fun for about 20 minutes before it becomes one of the worst films of 2018. It’s the typical DC garbage can of a film and proof that Warner Brothers has learned next to nothing when it comes to making a good comic book movie since Christian Bale took off the cowl (Yes, Wonder Woman was good—the lone exception.) Jason Momoa returns as big, tattooed, beefy Arthur, the dreamy son of a Lost City of Atlantis queen (Nicole Kidman) and Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison), a lowly lighthouse keeper. Fett finds the queen washed up on the rocks and takes her home, where she promptly eats his goldfish. (What a laugh riot! She ate his pet fish!) She gives birth to Arthur, and the origin story part of the movie is well on its way. We see a few more moments in the fish man’s young life. Momoa eventually shows up in full party mode, and it looks like we could be on our way to some goofy fun. Alas, like Zack Snyder before him, director James Wan doesn’t know how to keep a leash on his epic, and this things goes bonkers in a bad way. The undeniable charms—and admittedly glorious hair—of Momoa can only go so far in this unholy mess.

1Glass Following one bomb after another during a 15-year stretch, in 2017, M. Night Shyamalan showed us he was still capable of good cinematic things with Split—a showcase for James McAvoy’s multi-persona performance and a creepy little thriller thanks to Shyamalan’s surprisingly deft direction. An after-credits scene showed us Bruce Willis as David Dunn, his superhumanly strong Unbreakable character, and the possibilities became very intriguing. The director announced his intention to make Glass and that Split was, in fact, the second part of what would be a trilogy. Glass would bring back the brittle-boned character of that name played by Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable, along with Willis and the newly introduced McAvoy character(s). OK, sounds good. Let’s go! Well … shit. 2019 has its first legitimate clunker. Shyamalan is up to his old tricks again—the kind of loopy, half-assed filmmaking that made the world scratch its collective head with The Happening, The Village, The Last Airbender, After Earth and Lady in the Water—all wretched stink bombs. He has a remarkable ability to employ both lazy and overambitious writing simultaneously. He puts a lot in play with Glass but doesn’t seem to have a distinct idea of where to take it. Plot holes abound like wolf spider offspring jumping from their momma’s back when you slam a shoe down on her. There are so many, it’s hard to keep track of them.

5If Beale Street Could Talk Director Barry Jenkins follows up his Oscar winning Moonlight with a beautiful, heartbreakingly great movie. The film is full of moving performances from all, including Regina King as a steel nerved mother and Stephan James as a jailed man proclaiming his innocence. It’s a stirring family drama focused on a young black couple Alonzo—”Fonny”—and Tish (Stephan James and KiKi Layne) in the 1970s. Within the first few minutes of the film, we learn that Tish is pregnant, and Alonzo is incarcerated. He’s jailed for a sexual assault against a woman, something he vehemently denies. While he awaits trial, Tish remains loyal and must inform her family of her pregnancy. The extended scene when Tish tells her parents and, subsequently, Fonny’s family that she is pregnant, hits all kind of notes. It runs the virtual gamut of emotions, setting the pulse for the rest of the movie. It’s also where Regina King begins to shine as Sharon, Tish’s beautifully, unconditionally supportive mother. It’s the beginning of a performance that is gathering much deserved awards. King isn’t alone in the magic department. Colman Domingo is terrific as Tish’s good-natured dad, as is Teyonah Parris as Tish’s strong sister, Ernestine. The pregnancy revelation scene is capped with a sudden turn of emotions as Fonny’s family has a much different reaction, led by their religious mom, Mrs. Hunt (Aunjanue Ellis). Jenkins and company take us from a place that is very comfortable to extremely raw in a flash, and it feels genuine. In fact, Beale Street doesn’t contain a moment that doesn’t feel genuine.

3Mary Poppins Returns Casting Emily Blunt as the iconic title character in Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel 54 years in the making, proves to be a stroke of genius. Casting Lin-Manuel Miranda in the role of Jack, a copycat character modeled after Dick Van Dyke’s Bert in the original classic, well, not so much. Blunt plays the role with her own sensible spin, not by any means copying what the great Julie Andrews did over half a century ago, but nonetheless giving us a practically perfect variation on the infamous nanny. Miranda sports the same cockney accent—not nearly as gloriously, wonderfully bad as Van Dyke’s—and plays a lamp lighter in London instead of a chimney sweep. His part of the film feels like a giant missed opportunity because, while he can sing and dance up a storm, he isn’t funny. Van Dyke was funny. The result is a movie that has a lot of charm and some amazingly good sequences—with Blunt powering us through. But while I might’ve been sitting on the fence as the film headed into the final turn, my attitude went full positive when none other than Dick Van Dyke shows up as a helpful banker. He not only shows up but gets on top of a desk and dances better than anyone else in the movie. It’s only a few seconds but, I’m telling you now, they are some of the best seconds any 2018 film has to offer—pure nostalgia heaven.

5Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse While Tom Holland’s live action Spider-Man remains in limbo due to that infamous Thanos finger snap, Sony Pictures ups the ante on the Spidey franchise with the eye-popping, all around ingenious Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse, one of 2018’s greatest cinematic surprises. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is trying to adjust to a new, upscale school after winning a scholarship. He’s away from his big city friends and getting some guff from his well-meaning police officer dad (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants him to appreciate the chance he’s been given. Miles’s uncle (the ever busy Mahershala Ali) keeps him grounded, encouraging him to continue as a graffiti artist. On one of their painting excursions, Miles is bitten by a strange spider and then—well, you know. He eventually crosses paths with the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker (Chris Pine). And, as the plot would have it, parallel universe portals open and allow in a whole fleet of different SpiderMen, Spider-Women, Spider-Pigs and Spider-Robots. That group is comprised of Peter B. Parker (the invaluable Jake Johnson), Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Ham (a mishmash of Spidey and Porky Pig voiced by John Mulaney), Peni Parker and her robot (Kimiko Glenn) and, best of all, Nicolas Cage as the blackand-white Spider-Man Noir. So Miles is one of many Spider entities on hand to go up against Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), whose corporation is responsible for the time hole rip allowing all of his adversaries into his corner of the universe. Like any good comic book, the movie is stacked with action, plot threads and many twists and turns.