A Night with the King

I dislike everything about this movie; I was actively infuriated by its clichés and unoriginality. I hate the characters so much, I hated the story, and I hated the concept. Man, I had a bad day when I watched this and it certainly didn’t help.I need to deviate from my personal format to express my distaste.

Let’s get the good out of the way before ranting. The acting was good; Tonto Dike has been having a good run lately. I hope she has come back to us, the way we used to love her and in some scenes she was so emotive, so expressive. This also applies to Oge Okoye, but it’s going to take a while to welcome these actresses back into the fold for their stupid choices in roles (Lady Gagaa I’m glaring at you). The accents though…. Any time when they were in a scene together , it was hilarious because they were both trying very weird accents. Are you American? British? Scandinavian? Australian? Halima Abubakar was alright as was Jibola Dabor. Overall the acting was pretty good especially coming from Fredrick Leonard. The extras on the other hand were wooden especially Bathsheba’s brother.

The directing set and everything else was good. The costuming was a bit eyebrow-worthy but generally okay. The soundtrack was on point and I felt it was visual stunning. The picture quality especially must be commended.

Now time for the rant. I am so so so tired of this evil queen thing, at every unoriginal turn I became even more enraged. Apart from originality I was also annoyed at the characters, the king who was just being led along like some kind of foolish cow, the Queen whose hands I was not  sure was entirely clean and Bathsheba . Saw that one coming a mile of. The characters were so boring, so uninteresting. It went on for far too long, and it was very frustrating. But what really crossed the line was that the elders instead of focusing on the character of the evil Queen could only focus on her gender. This is a problem these evil queen stories have; the fault of these characters doesn’t lie in their evil deeds instead in having the audacity to do it while being female. That infuriates me. These days you don’t get a better villain of this sort outside of Ugezu, J. Ugezu film.

In conclusion while I personally dislike it, it makes an entertaining enough movie plagued by the fact that it could have been better. By the way what kind of a name is Bathsheba?  It’s like they didn’t even try to keep her character a secret. Were they trying to go for a biblical theme? Bathsheba in the story of Salome?