‘The Kid Who Would Be King’ is a rare original family fantasy film

Posted on February 1, 2019

By MARK VIOLA

A lot of fantasy films directed towards children and families are based on existing books, and, unfortunately, it is really hard to adapt a lengthy book into a quality movie. That’s because the filmmakers tend to have to either expand a shorter story into a feature-length movie or try to cram hundred of pages into just two hours of screen time. It can be done, but the failures outnumber the successes.

That was why I was intrigued by the new film written and directed by Joe Cornish (“Attack the Block”), “The Kid Who Would Be King,” an original story he wrote directly for the screen. Although the movie isn’t perfect, it benefits from the fact that it was written to fill its two-hour runtime and manages to tell a pretty far-ranging story without everything feeling rushed.

That story follows a young British boy named Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, “Alice Through the Looking Glass”) who, along with his friend Bedders (newcomer Dean Chaumoo), has had a hard time in their first year of high school, mostly due to two bullies, Lance (Tom Taylor, “The Dark Tower”) and Kaye (Rhianna Dorris, “Secret Life of Boys”). One day, Alex finds a sword stuck in a stone, just like King Arthur of legend, a story he has loved ever since receiving a book about the legend from his now absent father.

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