It's Hard Out Here for a King

Rating: 5/10 (20 November 2019)

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" was on TCM the other night. I re-watched a little bit of it, and then I had this brilliant idea that I wanted to make a new adaptation of it, but I don't like any of Edward Albee's dialogue, so I'm going to dump it all and write my own. It's going to ROCK, and I don't see how I could possibly fail. It's not like Albee's dialogue had anything to do with the success of his play.
If you're going to give us yet another screen adaptation of "Henry V" (because apparently neither the Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh versions exist) but you're not going to use Shakespeare's actual text, then the least I feel I deserve is a "Henry V" that feels like it has some reason for existence -- i.e. relevance to our current times. But this film doesn't have that. It's just full of a lot of cliche "it's hard out here for a king" ideas about leadership, politics, and war that we've heard a million times in a million better movies. "The King" looks handsome, but its own sense of self-importance is so cumbersome that watching it is like slogging through the mud that mires the English and French warriors fighting it out in the film's climactic battle.
The film is slow and ponderous and its solemn tone never varies. Timothee Chalamet (as Hal) seems bored to be in this film, and his performance has a curious lack of energy. The first time we see him in the movie he's sleeping, and it's like he never fully wakes up. I'm sure his bedroom eyes could make a tweener swoon, but my goodness someone give the boy a sandwich and a jolt of caffeine. My wife could body slam this dude, and she's about 5'4" and 120#.
Joel Edgerton, who wrote the screenplay, plays Falstaff, but his primary purpose for being in the movie is to look gross. The film wants us to think the relationship of Falstaff and Hal is critical to the plot's outcome, but it doesn't ever feel like more than a sketch. In fact, that applies to the whole movie. I saw one review that described this movie as being a bunch of plot developments on an outline that no one ever bothered to connect to one another with substance, and that's a pretty apt description of my own experience watching it.
With about five minutes of screen time, Robert Pattinson shows up late in the film (because he's obligated to appear in literally every movie released in 2019) and tries his hardest to inject some life into it by way of a Monty Python French accent. It's like he listened to all of director David Michod's notes on how to play the character and then was like "nah." He makes fun of Hal's penis size before beheading a child and then slipping around in some mud, and appears to be having a blast doing it. I'm glad he had fun, because someone connected to this film deserved to.
Grade: C+