Kings is supposed to be a movie that shows the life of one single (presumably foster) parent family over the course of seven weeks prior to the Rodney King verdict which sparked the LA Riots. The actual focus of the movie is the oldest son, who acts as a kind of second parent that helps raise the continuously expanding brood of children. He is torn between his responsibilities and naturally wanting to be around kids his own age, which only leads to trouble. There is rarely a moment before the riot that ever feels normal.
If I’m being charitable, Kings is trying to depict a city tense and under siege and sees the riots as a natural reaction that releases pressure. The opening scene is the best one, and the rest of the movie only speeds downhill from that point on. The problem is that by only depicting the tension, not the time before the exacerbating events, it never compares and contrasts normal life with life after volatile events. The movie creates the sense that the insanity of that time is actually normal, and the cops are totally reasonable to treat these (mostly black) people as if they are criminals. The tone of the movie is exasperating and constantly at a ten, and there is no real cohesive narrative or organic momentum, just chaotic screaming and frenzied action punctuated by clips from the news. The story never achieves a balance between drama and comedy or attains any kind of rhythm in the way that the events unfold.
Character development is mostly nonexistent. The writer/director does not seem to understand that some of her characters seem more manic, as if they are suffering from mental illness, rather than buckling under pressure from the outside world. She seems to believe that by occasionally throwing in a reference to Rodney King or police brutality, it excuses the unintelligible sentence structure that came before. For example, if you turn on the closed captioning during the first introduction of Nicole, the oldest son’s crush, her little rant makes no sense, but leads to cheering as if she is the next Che Guevara. What!?! Other than randomly gardening, she is mostly a bundle of energy and trouble. No black child is voluntarily sneaking into the back of a LAPD cruiser during this period, especially after expressing so much visceral disgust over the police. Most characters depicted regularly don’t even have names, especially the children. I think that the problem does not lie in the characters, but the writer, who veers from one scenario to the next with no sense of logic.
Kings features Halle Berry, who clearly needs a better agent or therapy so someone can explain to her that she deserves better than this, and Daniel Craig, whom I better never hear complain about playing James Bond after seeing this excrement. You bared your butt for this mess! I expect him to be shirtless and in swimming trunks in every movie after this one! He is retroactively less attractive and talented for being in this film. I don’t care how much he tried to redeem this mess, and it is clear that he approached this material with more thoughtfulness and charm than it deserved. They barely appear until near the end of the movie. Berry’s matriarch seems to suffer from the same malady as Josephine Baker. She keeps taking in kids, but seems negligent, not benevolent, since they are always shown as hungry and unruly. She is mostly absent and instead of being shown as a pillar of the community, she seems like part of the problem—biting off more than she can chew and despite love and implied effort, abusing them in the process by not meeting the children’s basic needs. If there was going to be a character that I wanted the film to focus on, it is the woman that she talks to when the riots begin. She seemed more ordinary.
There is one unrealistic scene of joy when the hungry kids led by the most recent addition, a volatile teenager, takes them shoplifting then they have a feast with the spoils of their thinly disguised expedition. This moment explains their subsequent actions as kids not understanding the gravity of the situation or possible consequences, but engaging in criminal behavior as a child’s reasonable response to poverty. The riot is like the fourth of July complete with homemade fireworks, i.e. Molotov cocktails. The problem with Kings is that by choosing to depict this particular peculiar family, the movie is centering an aberration as if it is normal, and giving tacit permission to viewers to think that black people live this way. Maybe my respectability politics is showing, but in real life, black kids can’t act that foolish, especially in front of your mom, because your mom really would beat your ass. I read somewhere that the filmmaker actually interviewed people to prepare for this movie. I wonder how the people who were interviewed feel about the final product. I’m willing to bet that they weren’t pleased.
I don’t care what the intent of the filmmaker was, Kings ends up feeling racist as if all minorities are criminals and/or crazy, and even the most respectable one is prone to violence. Kings makes The Help seem like an intersectional masterpiece. I found the whole movie unrealistic and insulting. It felt more like someone’s fever dream of poverty porn or life in the ghetto. This melodramatic nonsense never feels as if it was familiar with a credible concept. The eleventh hour romance is too little, too late, and let’s face it, even if an alcoholic, rage fuelled, appliance tossing next door neighbor looked like Daniel Craig, why would we want her to date him, the guy that she and her children had to cower under a table so one of his stray bullets would not accidentally hit them? I’m supposed to buy that when he is sober, he is not only hyper functional, but wants to spend his sober, sane, best moments with these nightmarish children.
Kings is the worst movie of 2018. There are plenty of other movies with scenes in which Berry and Craig appear naked so watch one of them instead of this one. I am so glad that I did not pay to see this movie in the theater because otherwise I would have been big mad. I understand that the individuals who helped make this film did not know what the whole movie would look like so they can’t be blamed for this dreckitude, but someone in the studio saw this entire movie and instead of vowing never to release it then burying it in a vault to insure that only a real life Indiana Jones could access it, they let it see the light of day. Shame on the studio and Deniz Gamze Erguven, the writer and director! People claim that her first movie was better. I don’t believe you!
Side note: apparently the title is a reference to Rodney King and Martin Luther King Jr., who is never mentioned once in the film! Wow! So Kings started with a high concept, but is actually complete garbage in execution.