Directed by Matthew Lopez
Year: 2023
Language: English
Shaun’s Score: 1.2/5 ★
Before Watching:
Good lord, Amazon. Clearly, this was fundamentally the sequence of events that happened in some Seattle boardroom:
An Amazon executive saw how hugely popular Heartstopper had become, a boon for Netflix during an otherwise embattled period of their business cycle.
Some other Amazon executive remembered reading this article about how LGBT content is one of the fastest growing entertainment categories globally, particularly in Asia which has ~60% of the world’s population.
Immediately, the Prime Video original programming creation team (famous for My Policeman, Shotgun Wedding, The Boys and… I guess that’s it? Seriously, The Consultant with Christoph Waltz was the biggest let down) was ordered to fast-track a cheesy, gay romcom.
Amazon doesn’t care about their streaming service1, so they put almost negative effort into ensuring the film’s quality.
And what does every Amazon production have in common? Horrible writing.
Red, White & Royal Blue is based on a novel that is (allegedly) less cliché than the film, centered around a high profile, scandalous love affair between the Prince of England and the U.S. President’s son. The film adaptation stars Taylor Zakhar-Perez as President Uma Thurman’s son Alex alongside Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Henry. They start (obviously) as enemies with low opinions of each other—Alex thinks Henry is a privileged snob and Henry thinks Alex is an American. A misstep at a diplomatic event lands them on the cover of every tabloid on both sides of the pond, speculating if their rift will spell bad news for US/UK relations. Luckily, Uma Thurman dances her way in to save the world by forcing the boys to be friends. And well… bilateral relations ensue.
Let’s start with this transition—the “enemies to lovers” format of queer cinema is already a tad overplayed, but here the turnaround is especially fast and unbelievable. Alex and Henry go from I-detest-you to clandestine-rendezvous within 12 minutes of screentime; we barely comprehend their initial feud before Alex is all up in Henry’s fish and chips. This is a common thread throughout the film—problems are solved too easily, with an unsustainable number of fast-forwards used to cram the entire novel into two hours so we can spend time instead focusing on their Pounds (Sterling).
What’s more, the acting is bleh, but I mostly blame that on the writing. Guilty pleasure content like this relies on cliché and low-hanging fruit to make viewers chuckle, whether that means cross-cultural stereotypes (“I want you eating a crumpet in Merry Old England by sunset!”) or just cartoonish, larger-than-life characters. How can such an adult film feel so childish? I've never before seen this level of Disney Channel Original Movie energy balanced by this quantity of oral sex innuendos (Nickelodeon… now that’s another story).
Look, I get it—we need queer stories that have happy endings (and some people want stories that have, em… happy endings). But the quality of LGBT cinema in other parts of the world is simply outpacing English language production; Taiwan in particular has managed LGBT blockbusters like Your Name Engraved Herein and Marry My Dead Body that entertain while not compromising on writing, directing, and acting. Seriously, English producers—think with your brain and not just with your Washington Monument/Big Ben.
Red, White & Royal Blue is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
After Watching:
How on earth did director Matthew López not expect an R rating from the MPAA? Say what you will about violence and heterosexual intimacy getting an unfair pass, but the sexual content in Red, White & Royal Blue is not subtle.
And yes, dammit, Taylor Zakhar-Perez and Nicholas Galitzine are both very attractive and have passable chemistry. That might make the film watchable, but it certainly doesn’t excuse the absolutely bonkers political reality that it portrays. The phrase “we don’t even need the Midwest!” coming out of a Democrat's mouth is enough to make any 2016 Election2 survivor shiver, and somehow President Claremont is able to win Texas while losing Michigan? It’s also a strange choice to replace the book’s main villain (the Republican opposition) with a gay POLITICO journalist, which feels… off-message? Who wrote this script, Donald Trump?
Finally, the film doesn’t portray any real conflict. Alex and Henry’s relationship plays as more of a PR obstacle than anything else, framing the choice of coming out on one’s own timescale as their key “queer liberation” struggle. The book, by contrast, dives more into social expectations of public figures, which would be a far more interesting and politically potent discussion. Red, White & Royal Blue is a Royal disappointment, and neither Uma Thurman’s syrupy accent nor Henry’s reference to In the Mood for Love (2000) as the “swooniest” can stop me from Brexit-ing from my Prime Video subscription.
In fact, they barely care about anything other than Amazon Web Services, which is their only really profitable arm; those of us in the financial industry often joke that Amazon is a “cloud computing company that dabbles in e-tail.”
Which is the election the book was supposed to hypothetically be about…