A movie made in 2014 but not released until 2022. Supposedly, it was delayed to work on the special effects. This means that I absolutely had to watch it. Even if it was only released in movie theaters during a pandemic. But I was confident that there wouldn’t be a lot of people in the audience. And I was right. We were the ONLY people in the audience.

The King’s Daughter is very loosely based on the 1997 book, The Moon and The Sun. King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnan), the Sun King of France, wants to be immortal. He sends Captain Yves De La Croix (Benjamin Walker) to the high seas to bring back a mermaid. Dr. Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber) believe that if the king consumes the mermaid’s heart, he will be granted immortality. Meanwhile, the king has sent his priest and advisor, Père La Chaise (William Hurt), to retrieve his daughter, Marie-Josèphe (Kaya Scodelario), from the convent where she has lived her entire life under the guise that the king needs a new composer. Marie-Josèphe befriends the captured mermaid and tries to free the creature when she learns of her father’s plan.

Let me start off with : This is not a good movie. The best thing about this movie is Julie Andrew’s narration in the very beginning. Unfortunately, she does not narrate the entire movie. Only about the first half hour. I’m pretty sure her narration is one of the reasons the movie got delayed. Without her telling me what the hell was going on, I would have been completely lost.

I went into this movie knowing it was going to be bad. The question was “how bad?” Before word is even spoken, you can tell you are in for a ride based on how awful the characters look. Pierce Brosnan was given a Party City wig for his role as King Louis XIV. At no point in this movie does he ever look good. He looks like someone else was cast in the role, filmed the whole movie, then someone decided to CGI his face onto that actor’s body.

In addition, all of the costume decisions were strange. The movie is supposed to take place sometime in the 17th-century. Yet all of the women are literally wearing prom dresses from 2014. There isn’t a single dress that is historically accurate. The men’s clothes are only slightly better. Most of the men’s clothes that I saw were tailored in a way to make them look slightly accurate. Like, if you only saw them in silhouette, you might think “Yeah, that looks about right.”

And, of course, there are giant plot holes everywhere. I haven’t read the book itself but the synopsis on Wikipedia doesn’t say anything about the king having a daughter. Marie-Josèphe is supposed to be a lady-in-waiting to the king’s niece. Making this drastic change gives the movie a very weird vibe. In the movie, the king knows he has a daughter and knows where she is but doesn’t care anything about her until…the music at his palace begins to suck? I honestly have no idea why he really brings her to the palace. He claims it’s because he needs a composer and she loves music but that makes no sense. And when she is at the palace, he mostly ignores her except in very specific situations where it looks like he wants to have sex with her? Oh, and one of the movie’s conflicts where he tries to marry her off to a lord in his kingdom because he spent all of his money trying to find the mermaid.

I figured that this was going to be a movie that I wouldn’t be able to recommend. However, if you like terrible movies, this would be perfect. As a matter of fact, if you are going to watch this, please come back here and explain it to me. Why did anyone think that this was a good movie to make? Why did anyone actually agree to work on it? But, if you are a normal person with normal interests, stay far away. Even Julie Andrews couldn’t save this one.