More of a Duke
Personal beliefs are irrelevant when animation and filmmaking are this uninspired.
The King of Kings
Director: Jang Seong-ho • Writer: Jang Seong-ho, based on the book by Charles Dickens
Starring [English]: Kenneth Branagh, Roman Griffin Davis, Uma Thurman, Mark Hamill, Pierce Brosnan, Oscar Isaac
South Korea / USA • 1hr 44mins
Opens Hong Kong December 20 • I
Grade: C
There’s an awful lot of weirdness in The King of Kings, and none that has anything to do with Jesus mythology or the umpteenth telling of the story of the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Distributed by the faith-based Angel Studios (but only the Christian kind of faith), which also produced the execrable Sound of Freedom, and is dropping an adaptation of Animal Farm (!) next year, TKoK got a release in some overseas markets in April to align with Passover and Easter; most of this film is about his preaching life with very little about growing up in a barn. But it works just as well at Christmas for those of the mind Jesus was born on December 25th (as well as of the mind he was white), because the film is actually based on Charles Dickens’ posthumous children’s book The Life of Our Lord (kind of like JRR Tolkien and The Hobbit, he wrote it for his kids), which he narrates to his troublemaker brat Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) after l’il Walt ruins a public reading of the author’s A Christmas Carol. If this child is supposed to be adorable, then big swing and a miss for VFX whiz (Haeundae, The Battle of Jangsari) turned director Jang Seong-ho.
But it’s a kids’ movie so maybe the very little kids this is aimed squarely at will feel seen, and parents who want to introduce their progeny to a film version that cleaves more closely to the tenets of kindness, forgiveness, charity and tolerance associated with Jesus then this will work fine. And it’s not like there’s a lack of star credibility here. The English cast is no joke: Kenneth Branagh, Uma Thurman, Mark Hamill, Pierce Brosnan, Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker and Ben Kingsley lend their voices. In Cantonese, Sammi Cheng (duh), Chu Pak-hong, Wong Cho-lamn and Chiang Chi-Kwong chip in.
It’s that kind of art
If you’re keen on TKoK, you know the story. If you don’t know the story intimately, you really don’t care, so briefly: After Walt makes a mess of dad Charles Dickens’ (Branagh) work by running around back stage shrieking about Excalibur and the greatest king of all (Arthur of the Round Table), he’s rightly disciplined for his poor behaviour and sent home. He whines a bit, then his mother Catherine (Thurman) doesn’t present a united parenting front with her husband and tells Charles he’s being a dick and makes him tell Walt a story. Charles then goes into the story of the One True King, his miracles, his beliefs – like how it’s wrong to profit from God’s word, though Angel Studios has made a tidy US$55 million off God’s word with this so far, just sayin’ – and his sacrifice for our sins. In his vivid telling, Jang weaves Walt and his shitty cat (and I have a cat, so you know this one’s awful) in and around the action in Bethlehem, and then Gethsemane and Jerusalem, as Jesus (Isaac) tussles with the vain King Herod (Hamill), Caiaphas (Kingsley, who, unfortunately I kept expecting to burst into “This Jesus Must Die” from that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical), the cleric who wants him gone, the disciple who will betray him, Peter (Whitaker) and finally the Roman Prefect who condemns him, Pontius Pilate (Brosnan).
Given how often this site takes the lord’s name in vain it will be easy to imagine the C grade is anti-religious bias. Quite the contrary. I don’t like rom-coms but a good one – should it make itself known – would get an A. Ditto for faith-based movies. “Christian movie” doesn’t automatically mean “bad movie”, but the last few to surface in cinemas or on VOD have been truly gawdawful (the God’s Not Dead films are just nasty), with sloppy writing, stiff performances and hideous messaging. That’s the problem. Is The King of Kings a mess on those fronts? No, but it also never rises above serviceable and uninsipired animation, with the kind of art that relies too heavily on the demonstrative movements someone who’s never had a conversation with another living soul thinks people make when they talk. An argument for this being AI-generated wouldn’t be totally crazy. Credit to TKoK for leaning into the “love thy neighbour” of it all rather than the trending Christian flavour of “burn the brown people”, which makes the film one of the better representations of Christianity on screen of late. And it is a decent primer, with Jesus’s most famous quotes (“Get thee behind me, Satan,” “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone,”) present and accounted for, as is a greatest hits of miracles (feeding the masses with two fish and some bread, walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead). That said, starting with Scrooge breaking down at the grim future he’s made for himself in a graveyard and Dickens dunking on King Arthur at every turn is a… choice. I’m not sure who it’s for, but there it is.