Review: 'The King's Daughter' is a chaotic mess of a fairy tale story that sat on the shelf too long

The fantasy “The King’s Daughter” is a mess from start to finish, a slapdash mix of poorly conceived drama, cliched dialogue, hammy acting, shoddy special effects and the scars of too many attempts to salvage something in post-production.

On the bright side, the filmmakers didn’t let Pierce Brosnan sing. 

Brosnan plays King Louis XIV of France, who in the late 1600s is concerned about his legacy. Instead of being nice and generous, as kings almost never are, Louis orders his best naval captain, Yves De La Croix (Benjamin Walker), to sail out to find the fabled city of Atlantis to capture a mermaid, whose life force is believed to bestow immortality.

Because the king wants an appreciative crowd at Versailles, Louis makes arrangements to have his illegitimate daughter, Marie-Josephe D’Alember (Kaya Scodelario), brought from the convent — where she’s a rebellious pain to the abbess (Rachel Griffiths) — to play her cello in the king’s court.

Marie-Josephe no sooner arrives at the castle when she hears the mermaid’s song and wants to replay it on her instrument, and has soon befriended the underwater beauty (played, wordlessly, by the Chinese star Bingbing Fan). Marie-Josephe enlists the remorseful De La Croix to defy the king and his sniveling science advisor, Dr. Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber), by helping the mermaid escape back to open sea and her family. With Marie-Josephe and the good captain on one side and Louis and Labarthe on the other, the mystery becomes which side the King’s private priest, Pere La Chaise (William Hurt), lines up with before the credits roll.

Director Sean McNamara, a prolific filmmaker whose last credit was the made-in-Utah “Sister Swap” Christmas TV movies, probably could have had another eight years to work on the chaotic script (credited to two writers, but evidence suggests there were others) and it wouldn’t have helped. Scenes are cut off abruptly, or allowed to go on too long. Dialogue that is supposed to sound arch comes off as peevish. A open-the-book framing device, complete with Julie Andrews’ narration, is a sad callback to far better fairy-tale stories.

Scodelario — who had come off the first “The Maze Runner” movie when this one was made and was three years away from starring in the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie — is enchanting, again, as the headstrong Marie-Josephe, but even she has trouble finding any scraps from which to build a coherent character. (Apparently, some good did come out of all this for Scodelario: She and Walker, the dashing star of “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter,” started dating, and were married a year and a half later; last month, they had their second child.)

The only person who seems to have succeeded at their job in “The King’s Daughter” is the costume designer, Lizzy Gardiner (an Oscar winner for “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”). Gardiner’s creations for the foppish French court, contrasted by Marie-Josephe’s elegant slim-figured gowns, are more inventive and original than anything else that made it onto the screen. One hopes they aren’t being used as dust rags seven years later.

——

‘The King’s Daughter’

★1/2

Opening Friday, January 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some violence, suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 98 minutes.