‘ The Kid’ overstays its welcome
The Kid Who Would Be King Rated: PG for fantasy action violence, scary images, thematic elements including some bullying, and language. Running time: 120 minutes.
6⏩⁄ out of 4 2
“The Kid Who Would Be King” is a mostly frustrating experience. The ingredients were there for a smart, entertaining movie, but writer-director Joe Cornish seemed to think he was making an epic, not a modest, pleasing children’s film. So a story that should have been 80 minutes, tops, is stretched to 120 minutes, on the back of child actors who can barely hold the screen.
Here’s a case of a filmmaker betting the house on a good, not great, hand. The premise is that many, many years ago, during the reign of King Arthur, Ar- thur’s evil sister, Morgana, was condemned to live as a prisoner in the underground netherworld. But before she left, she promised to return, once the British people became so morally bereft and selfindulgent that they would no longer have the ability to join together in a common effort against evil.
Well, guess what? That time has come. And now the country’s only hope is a bullied 12-year-old named Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), who finds a sword sticking out of a rock and pulls it out, with ease. He’s the designated savior of Britain, but nobody knows it. He doesn’t know it, either, and even once he figures it out, he doesn’t know what to do about it. Meanwhile, demons start coming up from the ground to attack him.
Everything about the set-up is fine — the presentation of a challenging situation, the not-so-subtle social commentary, plus the introduction of Merlin, who arrives disguised as a goofy but supremely confident high school student (Angus Imrie). Unfortunately, it’s right around that time that the movie gets a case of what Abraham Lincoln called “the slows.” At first, it’s a mild case. Then the movie overstays its welcome. And finally, when there’s no longer even the memory of a welcome, it keeps on staying.
Yes, there’s some intermittent fun to be had, but it’s mild fun and very intermittent. Patrick Stewart shows up as the real face of Merlin — the idea is that whenever he needs to be taken seriously, Merlin drops the youthful incarnation and presents his true face. And Rebecca Ferguson, who can do anything, has a couple of ferocious scenes as the evil Morgana. Alas, most of the time Morgana takes the form, not of Ferguson, but of a dragon; thus, another good actor is lost to computerized nonsense.
“The Kid Who Would Be King” has two essential flaws. The first is that, having told us that Alex and his friends would be attacked on three successive nights, the movie feels obligated to show all us three nights in exhaustive detail. But come on, hasn’t anybody ever read “A Christmas Carol?” You threaten three nights, but you get it all done in one.
The second flaw is even worse. The filmmaker assumes that we are as interested in Alex’s relationships with his comrades as we are in the fate of Britain and of humanity. The result is that a lot of screen time is devoted to exploring the emerging dynamic between Alex and the school bullies, Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Dorris), as they gradually, but ever so slowly, are won to his side. Meanwhile Lance, obviously, is Lancelot, so everyone watching knows where this is going. Why lavish a half hour of screen time on it?
The young actors are adequate, but they’re not intrinsically interesting, so their interior movements hold no fascination. With that in mind, “The Kid Who Would Be King” should have been an hour long, but an extra 20 minutes, just to stretch it to feature length, would have been forgivable. But a full 120 minutes for this was just borderline crazy.