Mixed.

Rating: 7/10 (8 November 2019)

Beautifully shot by the extremely talented cinematographer Adam Arkapaw & with a surprisingly evocative score which literally gave me goosebumps during certain sequences (courtesy of Nicholas Britell), "The King" looks & sounds incredibly impressive, additionally boasting numerous effective & understated performances from recognisable household name actors - most notably from lead Timothée Chalamet who is simply magnetic on screen...
But unfortunately, none of this compensates for the noticeable missed opportunities; multiple important events occur off screen & the plot is progressed through verbal exposition instead of visibly depicting the story as it unfolds, immediately breaking the "show, don't tell" golden rule of filmmaking. Hence, scenes are disjointed, often misconnected & incoherently constructed; giving a sense as though the feature was condensed & edited mercilessly until what must've been a 4 hour runtime was sliced to 140 minutes.
Dialogue is clunky, verbose & regularly provides the impression rewrites were required in order to perfect & streamline the narrative before shooting; after witnessing "Boy Erased", the main culprit for this error would be Joel Edgerton - who is continually proving himself to be unfit for helming the scripting process.
Questionable directorial decisions are made too: for instance, providing a character with a distracting lisp... Tonally, in such a brooding & atmospheric piece, a comical pronunciation felt out of place.
It's a good film... Not remarkable. There was potential for it to be - but that was unfortunately never realised.