by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kenneth Branagh, Oscar Isaac, Uma Thurman, Mark Hamill, Pierce Brosnan, Roman Griffin Davis, Forest Whitaker with Ben Kingsley
Intro:
… a decent retelling of the story of Jesus for younger audiences.
After a prolific live-action run over the past three years (which admittedly includes the highly controversial Sound of Freedom, Utah-based Christian production house Angel Studios are now trying their hand animation. Going with the quintessential Christian story of Jesus makes sense, except that this isn’t quite that straight-forward. Rather than a direct adaptation of the Biblical story, this instead adapts The Life of Our Lord, a children’s book written by Charles Dickens as a way for him to tell the story of Jesus to his own children.
That specific framing provides a slight meta edge, as the film is built on Dickens himself (Kenneth Branagh) narrating this story to his son after an adorably hijacked theatre performance of A Christmas Carol. Dickens’ authorial voice gives the impression that he can transport himself, his son, and their cat back to early-AD Jerusalem. Branagh and the rest of the voice performers help liven up a story most are already familiar with, but also distract from the… unfortunate animation.
Coming from South Korean studio MOFAC (and directed and co-written by JANG Seong-ho, whose bread and butter is VFX for live-action films like Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance), the visuals here are not great in a number of ways. The scenes with the Dickens clan look standard enough, but the actual Jesus story has everyone looking like bobblehead figurines, and not particular graceful ones either when they need to move on-screen. The framing does helps smooth this over, allowing it the appearance of a Nativity play of the kind acted out by moving dolls, but even that becomes a stretch to justify. The environments and divine imagery look alright, but… it’s easy to get distracted from them, let’s say.
Then there’s the actual retelling itself, which shows some healthy refraction through Dickens’ own faith, employing a Unitarian-esque ambiguity as to Jesus’ divine heritage, which allows the actual morals within these tales to stick better; portraying goodness not as something special but something that can be practiced by anyone. There’s an unfortunate bit of Passion of the Christ-itis in its emphasis on the Pharisees’ role in Jesus’ death, and the conflation of disability with sin is still a big yikes all these centuries later, but in showing Jesus as a symbol of forgiveness and allowing those who have wronged to learn from their mistakes, Oscar Isaac’s down-to-earth and lightly sly delivery makes it all resonate.
The King of Kings is a decent retelling of the story of Jesus for younger audiences. There are sticking points, both in this specific retelling and in the story as it has survived to the present day, and the animation is wonky, but it not only gives an absorbing performance of that story, it also makes the act of storytelling part of its main narrative, which is a novel take that helps the film stand out. It also helps that, given the post-God’s Not Dead wave of Christian cinema and how regularly unpleasant a lot of it is, its artistic merits go beyond pre-established agreement with the text, along with conveying Christian ideals and morals for their own sake rather than combative defensiveness.
It’s unlikely to catch much wind with pagan audiences, but for its target demographic, it has more to offer entertainment-wise than the likes of Two by Two or The Star.
