‘The King’s Daughter’ is bland and bad, but not ‘laughably bad’ (which is too bad)

Rife with tired fairy-tale tropes, “The King’s Daughter” is about as bland as bland can get.

King Louis the XIV of France (Pierce Brosnan) kicks off the movie by surviving a terribly-acted assassination attempt, the only casualty of which was, sadly, Brosnan’s performance. The Sun King, having only then become acquainted with the concept of his impending mortality, decides he must rip out the heart of a mermaid during a lunar eclipse in order to become the immortal ruler of France — which I can only assume is the 17th century version of buying a sports car during your midlife crisis.

Complicating matters further is the King’s long-estranged and illegitimate daughter, Marie-Joseph (Kaya Scoldelario), who finds and befriends said captured mermaid (Bingbing Fan). Marie-Joseph, having lived her entire life sequestered away at a convent, has absolutely no idea of her “king’s daughter” status, and the movie doesn’t see fit to tell her until almost an hour in.

The plot is based on Vonda McIntyre’s 1997 sci-fi/historical fantasy novel “The Moon and the Sun,” a book that beat out George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” (yes, you know the one) for the Nebula Award the same year. I haven’t read McIntyre’s original story, but I can only imagine this is a weak, muddy collage of her initial concept.

After the rights were acquired in 1999, the movie that would eventually be rechristened “The King’s Daughter” bounced around different production companies and directors for the next 14 years. Both The Jim Henson Company and Disney were attached at various points, and Natalie Portman was rumored to star in the early aughts.

A moment of silence, please, for what could have been, because obviously all of that potential amazingness clearly fell through.

Cut ahead to 2014, when finally — after dozens of pre-production delays — the filming began at the actually palace of Versailles. The scenery in this movie is intermittently gorgeous and clunky, with it being hugely apparent when they were and when they were not able to utilize the historic architecture. But the important thing is the movie was being made, after years of back-and-forth, and was set to be released in April of 2015. But April came and went and there was no mermaid movie to be found.

This plagued project was once again delayed.

After eight more years, collecting dust in the dingy storage shed where unloved movies are sent to shrivel away, some unforeseen intervention occurred and “The King’s Daughter” (much like the movie’s own king’s daughter) was plucked from perpetual obscurity and shoved, bleary eyed and blinking, out into the world for all the see. (As was recently reported in the Argus-Courier, the Petaluma-based Lightstream Animation Studios contributed to the mermaid design, and the company, and Petaluma, get a mention in the credits).

"The King’s Daughter“ is not the worst movie I’ve seen, but it’s decidedly not good. Every moment reeks of a movie that’s been over-handled and watered down. I love Kaya Scoldelario, but even she —with full commitment and an impassioned performance — cannot save the script from its soggy sinkhole of banality. William Hurt shows up as a spiritual adviser to the king, and there’s an underlying twinkliness to his performance that is uncharacteristic for him, but sort of fun to watch.

Too bad the movie isn’t.

It’s not laughably bad, but it is a menagerie of poor choices, including a truly ill-conceived story book sequence that slaps a gritty “painting” filter over stills from the movie as the Queen of Genovia herself, Dame Julie Andrews, narrates. It’s totally unnecessary. Seriously, the last thing this move needed was narrative bookends to remind us its all a fantasy.Think of this as the dumber, more expensive ”Ella Enchanted,“ or a high-budget Disney Channel Original movie — and not one of the good ones.

For me, watching “The King’s Daughter” was increasingly frustrating because I could see the better versions of the movie struggling to get out. With more depth and development this could have been forged in the vein of Matthew Vaughn’s 2007 adaptation of “Stardust” by Neil Gaiman or Gore Verbinski’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” Instead, it feels like a clunky vision-board of better movies.

Not good enough to be entertaining and not bad enough to be fun, “The King’s Daughter” is messy, mishandled, and mundane. If you’re desperately curious, wait for its inevitable dumping onto airplane movie catalogs, but truth be told, this one is best left off your watch lists.