Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The King’ on Netflix, a Somber Period Drama-Slash-Battle Epic Elevated by Timothée Chalamet

Netflix film The King may be angling for some awards-season love, being a historical epic about England’s King Henry V, loosely based on truth and Shakespeare — and starring neo-wunderkind Timothée Chalamet, of Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird fame. It’s rife with some gaming of a couple thrones, and boasts a hoary battle sequence as its centerpiece. But does it offer us anything new?

THE KING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The king is dead, long live the king, and all that. King Henry IV (Ben Mendelsohn) is such a piece of work, his eldest son, Hal (Chalamet), is in bitter self-exile, drinking and laying with women and sleeping in well past sunrise, which is a major big whoop in the 15th century, because it’s far from typical princely behavior. He wants nothing to do with his father, who has a reputation for starting wars over petty rivalries, which thinly mask his power-hungry thirsty quests for conquest, etc. Hal has nothing but contempt for his father’s M.O. But as these things go, the old man succumbs to The Boils, and by necessity, Hal becomes Henry V. With succession comes as ugly a bowl cut as one can imagine, a notable lack of wine and women and the regular company of a lisping archbishop (Andrew Havill). It’s not an upgrade.

Henry V previously proved his mettle by besting a rival in single combat. He donned a knight’s clanking armor and, by not very tenderly inserting a dagger into his opponent’s neck, avoiding a bloody battle that would’ve inevitably resulted in many more deaths. One can only imagine what it’s like to be both empathetic and gifted in the art of slaughter, and that’s why they hired Chalamet for the job of playing a character who’s so complex, he kind of wants to be king but also maybe kind of doesn’t? In an attempt to be as unlike his father as possible, Henry V surrounds himself with an air of sober solemnity, for he is king, and he wears a fur-collared cloak heavy with the weight of eternity.

One of the first problems Henry V faces as a new monarch is What To Do About France. His dad always wanted to unite the English and French under his rule. Blind imperialism seems silly to young Henry V, until a trio of perceived slights and some possibly dubious advice — from some inherited advisors, led by Chief Justice William (Sean Harris) — gives him reason to cross the English Channel with sword and shield and armor and trebuchet. Actually, MANY trebuchets. Soon, those trebuchets are flinging rocks at a castle during a good old-fashioned siege, which precludes the arranging of armies on some godforsaken land soon to be rendered more godforsaken than ever by the blood and the mud and the stench of death. So perhaps the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Henry V leans on drinking buddy and honorable military veteran Sir John (Joel Edgerton) to help him strategize against the Dauphin of France (Robert Pattinson), who is generously described as a sneering, arrogant twat. The Brits are on the enemy’s pitch and grossly outnumbered, but Sir John comes up with a plan that’s so crazy, it just might work.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The King is one of those aristocrats-bloviating-in-firelit-castles movies (The Lion in Winter, things Kenneth Branagh directed in the ’90s, miscellaneous Elizabeths, etc.) mixed with a classic, gory battle epic. Speaking as a sucker for nicely staged, extremely medieval sequences of repulsive, scarring, horrible war, The King brought to mind everything from Braveheart to Lord of the Rings — and Game of Thrones, especially in one harrowing, suffocating scene.

Performance Worth Watching: It may be too easy to highlight Pattinson’s wildly entertaining glory-hog performance — he appears in but a handful of (stolen) scenes, and leaves a distinct impression. He distills all the haughty villainy of a cartoon caricature of a French nobleman and smudges it with a little deadly sociopathy. It’s some thick and rich ham gravy. It is too easy, in fact, because Chalamet does all the heavy lifting here. In one moment, he looks like a naive kid; in the next, he’s cunning, wily and dangerous. A little mud smeared on his face helps, but in his eyes he carries the weight of worry, and also a despairing sense of existential destiny. Chalamet is as true as ever.

Memorable Dialogue: Young, hungover Hal ignores the dying king’s request for an audience, and adds a stinger: “You might tell him the urgency was also wholly ignored.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Trebuchet porn! Nothing gets your haunches in a tizzy like a flaming rock being flung through the air and destroying something that probably took years of debilitating plebeian labor to construct. (Siege fetishists may be less satisfied, but I can’t speak for those weirdos.) All because one king sent another a ball as a gift of quasi-diplomacy. Yep, a ball. And possibly an assassin, although the details of that are a bit sketchy, although that didn’t stop Henry V from ordering a couple of beheadings, depicted in a rather graphic nature, what with the axe and the blood and the separation of one vital body part from another.

That’s the “enjoyable” stuff. Director David Michod maintains a humorless tone tempering any true enjoyment of the drama at hand, and at 140 minutes, The King demands some endurance. Although it’s inspired by Shakespeare, it lacks the density and art of his language, for better or worse; it’s easier to comprehend, but altogether less interesting. Still, even the talkiest scenes are sumptuously lit and photographed, the film rich in costume and set design and all the period trappings that invite our immersion in the time and place. Even when the movie gets ugly, it’s still quite handsome.

The real reason to dim the lights and gird your bowels and fire up this movie is Chalamet, who maintains the young king’s scrawny-but-fierce charisma. The real war is between England’s past and future, and his face always betrays the push-pull struggle of regression and progress. Through Chalamet and strong supporting turns by Edgerton (who co-writes) and Harris, classical themes of madness and corruption emerge, with quiet, subtle vitality. The final scenes are brilliantly rendered, and ambiguous enough to evoke our own modern, troubled times. You didn’t watch this movie thinking it was going to be fun, did you?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The King hews tightly to the tropes of its genre, but is lucky enough to have Chalamet and Pattinson there to elevate it above the mundane.

Your Call:

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The King on Netflix