Except for the princess, everyone in “The Princess” has a name. The movie’s anonymous eponymous protagonist, played by “The Kissing Booth” star Joey King, is an anything-but-passive heroine.
She isn’t so much a moral character as a one-dimensional empowerment symbol: “The Princess” represents the antithesis of any fairy-tale damsel who sat alone, waiting to be whisked away or married off. She begins the film locked on the castle’s top floor, wearing a wedding gown and iron shackles, and finishes it soaked in more blood than Stephen King’s Carrie, some of it hers, but most of it belongs to all the men who have underestimated her.
Over the next hour and a half, Joey King’s “The Princess” barely stops to catch her breath. Whatever you thought you knew about royals named Ariel (she sings!) and Belle (she reads!). This one learned Krav Maga behind her father’s back and could take down a man twice her size with a hairpin.
When opening their mouths, screenwriters Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton reach into a seemingly bottomless bag of clichés. Nonetheless, they should be credited with transforming the industry’s most archaic female stereotypes into 21st-century role models. Their solution: teach them martial arts and release them to a hundred or so similarly nameless medieval boys.
The resulting R-rated girls-on-top saga is structured similarly to “The Raid,” a single-location Indonesian action film in which a good group of cops hacks their way through a petty thief tenement building. The princess works her way down the CG castle’s high tower, one attempting to land at a time, facing off against gnarly new bosses at each level after defeating the two guards who stop in to check on our unwilling bride-to-be.
The first stop is a chamber in which a he-man with a bare chest and a bull-horned Teutonic helmet take a long leak. If the princess’s opponents are supposed to become more intimidating as she progresses, this devil-worshipping steroid freak suggests a promising start: He’s powerful enough to crush her with a single blow.
It’s safe to assume that some viewers will find it difficult to believe that the King’s princess can compete with such adversaries, but I only had to think back to Roger Moore’s time as James Bond to accept it. Moore could barely throw a punch, and when he wasn’t supposed to be skydiving or skiing, he was pantomiming against a rear-projection screen.
Sometimes audiences need to be trained to accept a different type of superhero (the Alicia-Vikander-as-Lara-Croft effect). King has put in the time for fight training, as she is nothing like the film’s dominatrix-style antagonist (former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko). The environments appear fabricated, but the choreography is original.
By the end of the first part, King is as bloodied as Bruce Willis was in “Die Hard,” which is another way of saying that she (Joey King) suffers damage but doesn’t let it slow her down.
“The Princess” shows how its main character Joey King learned martial arts from Linh (Veronica Ngo) and Khai through a series of awkward flashbacks (Kristofer Kamiyasu). Her father (Ed Stoppard) never approved of the classes, and he would have preferred to see his daughter learn practical skills such as how to start dancing the farandole and which fork to use in good table etiquette.
But now that his empire has been attacked by the brutal Lord Julius (a heinous Dominic Cooper) and his whip-wielding appropriate woman Moira (Kurylenko), he’ll be glad the princess studied “Atomic Blonde” instead of martial arts.
Julius intends to marry the princess and take the throne, but like everyone else in the kingdom, he does not believe she can fight back. Nobody thinks the princess is on her way to save her family from these barbarians. In some ways, our heroine is battling for more than just her family. She’s mocking the medieval patriarchy to the point where the movie’s idea of a happy ending is a massive funeral rather than a royal wedding.
A more intelligent script would have worked a historical-critical analysis into its relatively brainless chain of set pieces. “The Princess” isn’t as clever or twisted as 2019’s matrimony-averse “Ready or Not.” Still, it’s the kind of counterprogramming that a whole generation of viewers, altar-bound and hypnotized by decades of Disney movies, will wish existed when they were kids. That no shortage of kids will internalize when watching this bloody Hulu original behind their parents’ backs.
