The Kid Who Would Be King ** (2019, Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Denise Gough, Dean Chaumoo, Tom Taylor, Rhianna Dorris)

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) is a good-hearted but lame, tame and wilfully old-fashioned kids’ adventure movie, offering a fairly dull spin on the Arthurian legend. It just goes to show that, like Sherlock Holmes, the King Arthur story is well played out on screen. Can we have some new stories now please?

Andy Serkis’s son Louis Ashbourne Serkis is fair company as outsider London schoolboy called Alex who, with his nice best friend Bedders (Dean Chaumoo), has to see off a couple of school bullies, Lance and Kaye (Tom Taylor, Rhianna Dorris), before luckily stumbling across Excalibur, the mythical sword in the stone, and discovering he is the once and future king, even though we have already got a royal family in the UK.

Alex turns his enemies into allies as knights and his kitchen square table into a round table, and off the four jolly well, with the help of legendary wizard Merlin (either Angus Imrie or Sir Patrick Stewart, whether young or old) to take on the evil enchantress Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson).

Just as you are putting your coats on ready to leave, the film has a cruel surprise in store. A rather weak climax in Cornwall turns out to be false climax, and there is another rather weak one back in London, as Working Title send in the CGI big time. Oh this film does go on! This little story should take 90 minutes max to tell, but they allow it to ramble on to 120 minutes. Dull though The Kid Who Would Be King is, it is good natured and harmless.

The corny screenplay is by the director Joe Cornish, whose last film was Attack the Block (2011). Denise Gough has the thankless task of playing Alex’s mum. Angus Imrie, the son of Celia Imrie and the late Benjamin Whitrow, brings a bit of style to young Merlin.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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