Movie Details
The Princess (2022)
Director: Le-Van Kiet
Cast: Joey Joey King, Olga Kurylenko, and Antoni Davidov
Genres: Action/Fantasy
Release date: 1 July 2022
IMDB Rating: 5.7/10
Languages: Italian and English
Duration: 1h 34m
Trailer
Synopsis
How many Vietnamese directors do you know? There probably won’t be many of them, but Le-Van Kiet is working to ensure that you at least know his name in a few years. And he wants to go to Hollywood. He drew attention to himself with the successful action sculpture Furie, which can be seen on Netflix and opened the door to America for him. His shark horror The Requin starred Alicia Silverstone, but she doesn’t seem to be worth much, Princess could help his career a lot more. Firstly, because Disney+ is pushing it quite a bit, at least in our country, and secondly, because it’s a pretty good movie.
The Princess is a variation on Raid: Redemption, or Bruce Lee’s Game of Death. We have this tower with a lot of floors and a lot of bad guys and someone has to get from one end to the other. The change in this is that the nameless Princess wakes up on the top floor and needs to go downstairs. Why? To free her family and subjects, who are now being terrorized by the ruler of the neighboring kingdom, who has dictatorial tendencies and a bad temper, because the Princess refused to marry him. But he doesn’t know that soon he and his henchmen are going to get wrong.
Honestly, The Princess isn’t exactly a complicated movie, but on the other hand, everyone on the set was aware of that. In short, Joey King runs around the floors, defeats the villains – each floor is styled a little differently – then gets badly burned somewhere, but takes a second breath and fights his way to the happy ending. Fortunately, the whole thing is about 90 minutes long, so the simple plot, minimal efforts to develop the characters and their relationships, or the absence of twists probably won’t offend anyone. The princess clearly says from the beginning that it will only be about those battles. And they are not bad at all.
Le-Van Kiet may not be the next Gareth Evans from Raid and Joey King is far from Tony Jaa or Iko Uwais, luckily the two of them put on a fun enough and also pleasantly clear spectacle to make you want to see her and especially wish for both of them this honestly shot stupidity kicked off their careers. Although Le-Van Kiet remains a bit below the cutting edge when it comes to craftsmanship, he can still show off some fun stuff. Also, his princess action is not taken completely seriously and the villains are often sympathetically stylized. In one of the very first battles, the heroine has to fight with a two-meter cut, who is wearing only leather shorts and a giant helmet with horns, which will eventually become his downfall.
The princess knows about her simplicity, but that’s why she’s quite likable, and you can forgive her worse tricks and a certain repetitiveness. And when you consider the fact that it’s a showreel from a talented director rather than an ambitious film, it’s fun. Joey King wins the audience’s sympathy almost immediately and tries his best in the fights (who has a problem with tiny girls who fold hundred-pound cuts to the ground, will have that problem here as well), Dominic Cooper is having fun as the villain, and Veronica Ngo, who played already in Furie and has a decent career (Bright, The Old Guard, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny), she shows a lot of nice things here.
Apart from a fun event, however, the Princess has nothing to offer. But in this case, it would be a bit unfair to blame her, because from the beginning she plays a fair game with the audience and doesn’t try to convince them that it should be a grand fantasy or that she tried to push the action or fairy tale genre somewhere. It’s a nice wash with good fights, a likable actress, and short footage. Sometimes exactly this is enough for a person to be satisfied.
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