Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
It seems we’re in a bit of a lull recently. Now, I don’t want to be one of those film critics who gets their kicks from following that job description to the letter, but aside from Deadpool, the fare on offer has been mediocre at best since the turn of the year.
After last week’s dire Gerard Butler offering, I’m unsure why I decided that it would be a good idea to tootle down to the cinema again and hope that the second time was a charm.
I was wrong.
Kings of Egypt is a terrible movie, no two ways about it. The acting is bad, the direction is worse, the effects are shocking ... and that’s just scratching the surface.
It’s depressing, as someone who loves the ancient world so much that I chose to study it for my university degree, to see films in the lineage of classics and some of my all-time favourites like Ben Hur, Spartacus and Jason and the Argonauts descend into this. Even The Mummy did Ancient Egypt 10-times better.
It’s clear from the offset what this is trying to do, and that is recapture the magic of 300, which unexpectedly became a worldwide cult hit and propelled Butler’s career into the mainstream. It should have taken heed from the dozens of efforts since, that you just can’t harness genius twice, and understand there’s a point where you should stop trying.
The plot is simple enough. It’s a traditional high-fantasy story featuring multiple ‘kings’ (who aren’t actually kings in the movie, but for regional marketing sensitivities, they are) squabbling amongst each other.
These ‘kings’ (a regal title not even used in Ancient Egypt, they could at least have altered the title to Pharaohs of Egypt …) include main protagonist Horus (Coster-Waldau) and the mortal Bek (Brenton Thwaites).
On the day of Horus’s coronation by his father, Osiris, his envious brother Set (Butler), lord of the desert, shows up and ruins everything by taking control of Egypt. Bek teams with a defeated Horus on a quest through the sand dunes to find a way to beat Set and also save the woman he loves from death.
It’s pretty standard and overly-familiar stuff, lacking the imagination to come up with a setting and mythology that is in any way original.
Questionable decisions were made behind the camera, too. With its ever-present burnt-yellow cinematography, its excessively gilded production design and its blinding flashes of sunlight, the movie at times resembles a giant cinematic tanning salon.
This might have been all the better, perhaps, to darken the pearlescent skin tones of most of the actors on display. A lot of internet column inches have been devoted to the whitewashing of the cast, so I won’t retread it here, but when Butler doesn’t even bother to hide his Scottish accent, it’s a bit of a slap in the face.
Shoddy green screen work does them no favours either, with the fight scenes consistently underwhelming and silly. The characters often aren’t integrated well into the backdrop and the slow-motion, 300-esque action sequences think they’re much cooler than they actually are.
To be fair, the leads of the movie are all trying their best and take the material seriously, when it would have been much easier to ham it up and go down the cheesy route.
Thwaites is charming and energetic as lead character Bek, and shares good chemistry with Coster-Waldau’s Horus. Butler looks the part in his natural comfort zone as a fierce king or a warrior, but his portrayal of the villainous Set never has him convincing compared to his heroic turn as Leonidas, and the Scottish twang doesn’t help.
Ultimately, Kings of Egypt’s weaknesses far outweighs its strengths, and the film never quite knows whether to be fantastical or ground itself in reality. It’s not a complete travesty, but there are plenty of other options in this dime-a-dozen genre if you want better narrative, acting and effects.
Showing at Novo Cinemas, Cineco, Seef II, Dana Cineplex
Rating: 2/5
