A metaphor of female empowerment without character or heart.
Disney+’s ‘The Princess’ Is The Kind Of Movie That Could Have Been Designed By A Twitter Bot: take a part Rapunzel, another part Kill Bill and another #Feminism. Mix them together and… What do you get? A story about a princess, whose name is mentioned so quickly that it’s easy to miss or never mentioned at all, who refuses to marry a cruel sociopath who wants her father’s throne. When she rejects him at the altar, he kidnaps her and locks her in a tower. However, she soon escapes from her and fights her way through the tower, killing all manner of guards on her way to rescue her family and her kingdom.
The heroine is played by Joey King, who rose to fame thanks to Netflix’s ‘My First Kiss’ romantic comedy trilogy. In ‘The Princess,’ she throws herself into an unspeakably bland role: a metaphor for female empowerment with no character or heart to back up those tropes we’ve seen so many times..
Sociopathic suitor Julius is fiercely played by Dominic Cooper, but unfortunately his outsized performance is funny rather than threatening. In a better movie, Julius could be pretty terrifying; unfortunately, he is in ‘The princess’.
Julius’ right-hand woman and lover is the also supposedly menacing Moira, played by bona fide action star Olga Kurylenko. If anyone could bring gravitas to the mayhem of an action-comedy-fantasy movie, it would be her. However, Kurylenko suffers the same fate as Cooper: both trapped in a film of trite ideas whose only merit is the boring and poorly executed portrayal of the trite concept that a woman might not want to be forced to marry like a mule and that, without a male child, the lineage of an entire kingdom is in danger.
Even this categorization is quite generous, because the movie itself emphasizes it so often that it obviously starts to lose all meaning. Add to that the complete lack of narrative detail (nameless kingdoms in nameless lands, no sense of lineage, no history) and it all feels like a fever dream, except at least in a fever dream you buy the concept you’re dreaming of. ‘The Princess’ may not be a fatal flaw, but it is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
If you don’t want to know the ending, don’t read on, because spoilers for ‘The Princess’ come from here.
In the end, after killing all the guards, including Moira, and rescuing her entire family after her father, the King, couldn’t do anything at all (although, again, thanks to the complete lack of background we don’t have idea why), the monarch spontaneously decides that wow, you know, women really *can* be leaders. But to be like that, they have to do all these stereotypically masculine things like fight and kill and take no prisoners.
This need for women to behave like men in order to be successful is a fundamental problem within, well, the world, but also much of contemporary feminist pop culture.. Another good example is King Valyrie (why is the word ‘queen’ considered lesser than ‘king’?). And this is not just a problem that affects women; men are subject to the same binary thinking that classifies them as sexist or decadent.
(Okay, no more spoilers!)
But ‘The Princess’ isn’t thinking about any of this critically, because as we said, it’s not a movie that commits to anything significant at all. And worst of all: it’s not even entertaining.
Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
