Critics reviews

The [final] battle is, like too much of "The King," a slog of desaturated colors and endless slow motion that means to treat war as a brutal, meaningless affair, all the while capturing the action with a reverent grandeur that suggests there’s no other realm where heroes can be made.

That ["The King"] ends up being more of a showcase for Pattinson than Chalamet is the film’s biggest irony, and nearly the only thing that keeps Michôd’s latest from being a total drag. Chalamet, who has proven himself worthy of the stan culture around him in his previous performances, is a black hole of charisma as Hal

“The King” is a film full of surprises: It’s a saga that strays both from history and from Shakespeare in its tale of power and betrayal; it brilliantly casts Timothée Chalamet against type to portray a young man who has weighty responsibilities suddenly thrust upon him; and it’s a smart and taut bit of storytelling from David Michôd, whose previous feature “War Machine” was neither of those things.

A handsome, intriguing, strangely purposeless affair... What should be soaring is instead lugubrious; what should be a ripping good yarn is instead dutiful and a little bit dull... It still feels like a wan copy of something more vital. Perhaps the most abiding lesson of “The King” is that if you come for the Bard, you’d best not miss.

"The King" is a bizarre mix of fact and fiction that sacrifices the realism Michôd is trying to convey, as well as the humor and charm of Shakespeare’s plays... In Michôd’s version, the story is nothing more than a royal slog.

It’s an expansive medieval picture that takes sophisticated liberties with the Bard’s work, expressly with an eye towards presenting history and its contemporary lessons in an accessible fashion to a new age group... With weighty things to say about contemporary and corrupt institutions of power and even dangers of male hegemony, Michôd’s non-preachy “The King” comes with philosophical heft and visual authority to match.

This film replaces Shakespeare’s text with more comprehensible dialogue in the Game-of-Thrones-lite style, neuters the story’s famous emotional betrayal and even glibly suggests a throwaway conspiracy-theory explanation for the casus belli between the English and French before Agincourt... So much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.

[Michôd and his collaborators] have nervily reimagined and remixed both the epic and the intimate elements of this classic narrative and successfully given it a determinedly contemporary tone.

I admire the ethical clarity of this retelling... [but] I hate that, in order to make a case against leaders who concoct bogus intel to dispatch their subjects/citizens to kill or be killed, Michôd and Edgerton have turned a story we still debate into the most dully conventional kind of morality play — one that gets duller and more predictable as it grinds along.

Michôd has a gift for screen violence and is generally good with actors, yet time and again your attention drifts from Hal-Henry to the story’s edges, where the supporting actors nibble at their tasty bits. What Michôd never manages to make clear is what we are to make of this version’s nationalism, its glorification of war, its ambivalence toward corrupting power and its selective, finally misguided attempt to brush off Shakespeare.

The lithe, doe-eyed Chalamet may feel too physically slight for the role, but he brings a fierce emotional intelligence that moves his Hal much closer to believability, and Pattinson, as the fantastically camp Dauphin of France, is a master class in Gallic bitchery.

Michôd is too fine a director to stay stuck in a dank rut. And Chalamet and Pattinson have talents that go beyond crass teen-idol packaging. Still, the concept of Shakespeare only minus all that, you know, Shakespeare never recovers from the loss of poetry and purpose.