Review of The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

F you’re like me, every time the trailer for KWWBK came out, you rolled your eyes and wondered out loud why it hadn’t gone straight to streaming in the land of forgettable originals, Netflix. For the last week, Wife had counted me out on seeing it altogether, so she was surprised when I elected to see this with her instead of going to see blonde Anne Hathaway in the self-inflicted career wound that it sounds like Serenity has become. But within the first few minutes of Star Wars references and generally adorable middle school embarrassments, KWWBK reveals itself for what it is: an unassuming, unexpected delight.

We’re doing things a little differently for the next few hours while I recover from a month of slacking on reviews. The past two weeks have been hectic, filled with moving boxes and late nights, so I’ve been letting things slide. At the suggestion of Wife, I’m gonna try to review backwards in hopes that it helps with recall.

As I sat in my seat, pleasantly surprised by how funny these child actors were and how, for the first time in months, AMC had remembered to use the correct aspect ratio for its screen (it forgot to turn off the house lights until someone asked, but you can’t get ’em all), I was transported to the time Wife and I saw the Rock play Hercules in what I still feel is one of my all-time favorite classical themed movies of all time.

I remember going into it thinking it would be a way to kill a couple hours before I had to go back to doing homework, and after the first few references to zombies, it became increasingly clear to Wife and I that this movie was so far away from taking itself seriously that it had actually found a way to start making fun of itself in the script with some reliability. It was only after we walked out of BWWBK that Wife looked it up and noticed that the actress who played Morgan, Rebecca Ferguson, was, in fact, also in that ground-breaking schlocky film from years gone past, Hercules.

Attack the Block director Joe Cornish proves that lightning can strike the same place twice. His deployment of lovable, charismatic young actors and a self-aware, snarky script with moments of sentimentality is the magic recipe for a great kids film. Older Brother said that he and his colleague loved the film, even if it was a little long, which scans pretty closely with what Wife said. Wife added that if you think about the two concepts that the film wants to build its story around, Alex’s quest to learn of his lineage and the structure of the three nights before a final confrontation, there wasn’t a lot that could be cut.

I like that the film didn’t try to shove the four kids and Merlin into a single cohesive group with a single storyline, but rather it tracked the relationships between the two older kids, Lady Kaye and Lance, and the two younger kids, Alex and Bedders, separately. The script let them wrestle with different childhood struggles at different stages of development. Merlin and Morgan have their own kind of kinship when they confront one another on the rooftop of the school–Wife recalls Merlin’s line, “This is their world not ours”–which simultaneously gives the young Merlin an implicit power spike, but also in some ways humanizes the villain and maps their struggle into an issue of generational change.

Morgana’s ability to toggle between a humanoid form and other more monstrous shapes was very satisfying for someone who prefers a humanized depiction of evil rather than a disembodied Sauron-type Enemy. Morgan’s vice in this film’s interpretation is so perfectly apt for the times: it’s not that she’s ruthless or callous or corrupt. It’s that she feels “entitled” to the throne. Her sense of privilege is a marker of her villainy.

Wife thought there would be more about the aftermath of the final battle, I guess in Stranger things style where the carnage at the school requires the kids to take responsibility for damage they didn’t necessarily cause.

The simple magic of removing adults at twilight worked really well, both of us thought. It allowed for the kids to do a lot of dangerous things that would’ve just bogged the audience down with logistical questions otherwise. Speaking of bogs, the bog scene was fun. As was the physicality of the trees in the training scene.

BWWBK restores my faith in the genre of kids films, shows that the emotional lives of children, as Mr. Rogers was wont to say, are just as complex as any adult’s. The film has something to say about the paralyzing sense of helplessness that comes from being a child in this period of doom and gloom, both political and artistic.