HBO's 'The Prince' Animated TV Series: A Review

HBO’s new animated series ‘The Prince’ ruthlessly cuts the very deserving target of the British royal family down to size.

No doubt delicate viewers will find it repugnant, but the flawed show is funny enough to overcome what some may deem offensive.

HBO’s new aggressively irreverent animated series The Prince, which debuted on HBO Max on July 29th, sets its comedy sights on the target rich environment of the British royal family and relentlessly fires a ferocious fusillade of mockery at the monarchy.

The series, which is made up of twelve, 13-minute episodes and features such notable actors as Orlando Bloom, Allen Cumming and Sophie Turner, was first scheduled to premiere in the spring but HBO pushed that back out of sensitivity regarding Prince Philip’s death in April.

After having watched The Prince, which savagely lampoons all of the royals, I don’t think that deferential gesture will ease any hurt feelings among the Windsors.

The Prince’s caricatures of the royals are relentless and vicious. For instance, the Queen is a cruel, foul-mouthed, farting crime boss, and Prince Philip, a decrepit near cadaver.

Prince Charles is a spineless, big-eared, mealey-mouthed coward who berates his bride Camilla, a horse-faced mute, to get in the good graces of his mother.

Prince William and his wine-hound wife Princess Kate, are absolutely miserable and headed to divorce, are indifferent parents, and are incapable of doing even the most intimate of things without servants.

Speaking of servants, all of the royals are absolutely brutal towards ‘the help’. This is best portrayed by the devoted butler Owen (Allen Cumming), a sad-sack widower, and the two gay butlers, all of whom must delicately navigate the ever-shifting minefield of the monarchy or else find themselves fired…or worse.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are two of the more hysterical royal portrayals on the show, maybe because the caricatures of them seem more realistic due to their being such cartoonish people in real life.  

On The Prince the two of them are living in Melrose Place in Hollywood, and are subtly cross-eyed, which for some reason made me chuckle.

Meghan is a talentless actress and social climber leading the clueless Harry around by the nose, while Harry (voiced by an utterly brilliant Orlando Bloom) is such a dolt he cannot remember the name, or gender, of his baby, is astonished by the magic of refrigerators, and is so dumb as to be virtually unemployable.

That doesn’t stop him from trying though, as he reveals to Meghan that as a little-boy he dreamt of being a massage therapist, to which Meghan replies that as a little girl she too had a dream…of being a princess. A dead-eyed Harry then declares, “you kinda fucked that up”. Yes she did.

Meghan’s acting failures lead her and Harry to the Hollywood gutter of reality tv and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and then she brings reality tv to the royals, which culminates in a fistfight between the Queen and Lisa Rinna over a perceived slight to Ms. Rinna’s husband Harry Hamlin.

Then there’s Meghan and Harry’s HGTV show “Royally Screwed”, where they try and fix up houses on a budget for regular people. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

Considering the roasting Harry and Meghan receive on The Prince it’s no surprise that the show is on HBO as opposed to Netflix, as Harry and Meghan have a deal with Netflix rumored to be worth $100 million, and no doubt flex their royal muscles to squash the series and “protect their brand” if given the chance.

The main protagonist of The Prince though is Prince George, the 8-year-old heir to the throne and son of Prince William and Princess Kate, who is portrayed as an effeminate and obliviously and obnoxiously entitled child.

Prince George is basically Stewie Griffin from Family Guy but just a few years older, which should come as no surprise since the creator of The Prince is Gary Janetti, a writer for Family Guy.

And that is the biggest problem with The Prince, that it’s derivative of Family Guy.

The Prince follows the Family Guy formula with children acting like adults, adults acting like children, an extended musical number, and when mixed with Machiavellian palace intrigue, it all feels like ‘Family Guy Goes to Buckingham Palace’.

That’s not to say that the show isn’t funny, just that it isn’t original.

Some have been offended that The Prince is targeting a real-life 8-year-old, Prince George, with its comedy, and I suppose there’s some legitimacy to that. William and Kate are certainly displeased with the show, but to be honest, and maybe this is the Irish in me, I’ve a very hard time accepting a British royal, regardless of age, as a victim in any circumstance. It’s like with the Oscar winning movie The King’s Speech where we’re supposed to feel bad for the King George VI because he’s some stuttering, muttering jackass. No thank you.

Overall, The Prince is a mindless, quick watch. The episodes are short (13 minutes), don’t ask for much mental effort, and occasionally make you laugh…there are worse things in life. While I found it certainly could’ve been better, I also found it to be funny often enough.  

The best way to judge if The Prince is worth watching is to answer the question, do you like Family Guy? If Family Guy is a bridge too far for you, then The Prince is not a journey worthy of taking. But if you like exceedingly irreverent comedic shots taken at all things royal, then The Prince may very well be your cup of tea.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

X-Men: Dark Phoenix - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Absolutely no reason to ever see this derivative and dull snooze of a movie.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix, written and directed by Simon Kinberg, is the the story of Jean Grey as she comes to grips with her mutant powers and murky past. The film stars Sophie Turner as Grey, with the usual X-Men suspects James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender and Nicholas Hoult along for the ride, as well as a supporting turn from Jessica Chastain. Dark Phoenix is the sequel to 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse and is the seventh and final installment of the current main X-Men saga.

After I see a film I usually either sit in the theatre or go out to the lobby and write down my brief thoughts. After X-Men: Dark Phoenix I sat trying to think of something to write and was stumped. It wasn’t that I had no opinion about the movie, it is that I only had the most distant, passing and fading memory of what had just transpired on screen. Dark Phoenix is such a derivative, dull and middling movie that it proves to be instantly, and almost entirely, forgettable.

X-Men movies over the last 19 years have, in general, been aggressively mediocre, visually banal and dramatically mundane (the notable exception being 2017’s Logan). While some of the X-Men movies have been mildly entertaining and thematically intriguing, for the most part they have failed to live up to their extremely rich source material.

20th Century Fox came into the superhero market with a great deal of fanfare by handing the creative keys of the franchise to at-the-time esteemed filmmaker Bryan Singer, who directed the first film, X-Men in 2000, and four of the seven main X-Men films in total. But nearly twenty years after the X-Men’s cinematic debut, Fox leaves the superhero arena with barely an audible whimper. Dark Phoenix is a continuation of the downward trajectory of X-Men movies that was undeniable with 2016’s abysmal Apocalypse. It seems as though Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix were in a race to the bottom of the X-Men filmography…Dark Phoenix wins that race by a surprisingly strong margin, and is only notable for the fact that it is indeed the very dregs of X-Men movies.

For Fox to end their X-Men run with Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix is a humiliation almost equal to everyone’s least favorite pederast Bryan Singer’s fall from grace. One can only hope that Disney, which purchased Fox and with it the X-Men, can reboot this wayward franchise with some fresh creative blood that can resurrect this moribund series.

As for the particulars of Dark Phoenix…where to begin? The movie is stultifyingly dull, thematically trite, lazily acted, dismally written, impotently directed and is as visually stale and flat as possible. Besides that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? No doubt better than Dark Phoenix.

What is striking is that Dark Phoenix boasts a cavalcade of really top notch actors but is riddled with insipid performances. Jennifer Lawrence is a great actress and one of my favorites, but in her turn as Raven she so lifelessly mouths her lines it feels as if she is working the graveyard shift at the 24-hour Arby’s in Podunk, Kentucky. She seems genuinely embarrassed to be in the movie and entirely disinterested in being there.

Jessica Chastain is another quality actress who sleepwalks through Dark Phoenix. You can almost see the money signs in Chastain’s eyes as she vacantly goes through the motions.

Michael Fassbender reprises his role as Magneto and try as he might he simply cannot muster any mettle/metal in his performance…pun intended.

James McAvoy suffers even worse humiliations than the rest of the cast as in one scene, that is so ridiculous it made me laugh out loud, his Professor X is forced to “walk” on his crippled legs, to hysterical affect. This scene was like a bad Saturday Night Live skit, although that is something out of the Department of Redundancy Department.

Sophie Turner, last seen as Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones, is the film’s lead and she does not prove herself up to the task of carrying a feature film. Turner is a beautiful women but, sadly, as my life proves, beauty can only get you so far. Turner simply does not have the skill, charisma and magnetism to command audience’s attention for a feature length film. That doesn’t mean she will never be able to do that, it just means she cannot do it now.

The overwhelming feeling I had about the cast while watching this movie was that they were simply playing out the string and cashing in while they could. This is the last X-Men movie of this cycle, and these actors will most likely never play these roles again…so they need to get while the getting is good…and these performances felt more like a heist and a getaway than commitment to acting artistry. I suppose there is nothing wrong with that, the mortgage isn’t going to pay for itself after all, but it definitely leaves a sour taste in the mouth of fans as the movie’s stars grab the money and hustle to get out of Dodge as fast as they can.

Simon Kinberg wrote and directed Dark Phoenix, proving that he is not even remotely good at writing or directing. Kinberg’s script is abominable and his miserable direction is a major reason why such a stellar cast turned in such horrendous performances.

Kinberg’s script is so shallow and empty that the biggest feeling I had at the end of the movie is…what is the point of it? Obviously the point is to make money, which it might, but on a more philosophical level the question truly is…what is the purpose and meaning behind this movie? What is the animating philosophical/psychological/spiritual principle of this movie? Yes, the film does have some of the usual Girl Power posing and preening, which has become de rigueur lately, sprinkled throughout. Lines like “since women are always saving the men around here you should change the name to X-Women"!” and “your mind has been poisoned by men with small minds” and “you’re not a little girl anymore” and my favorite exchange where the villain (a female) says to Jean Grey, “you’re emotions make you weak” and Jean replies, “no, my emotions make me strong!” give the impression of a philosophical foundation but are nothing more than vapid and vacuous bullshit meant to appease and patronize the neo-feminists in Hollywood and no one else. In reality the film has no philosophical, logical, dramatic or narrative foundation upon which to build itself, instead it is a soulless, paint by numbers exercise in vacant big budget franchise movie making and nothing else.

In conclusion, Dark Phoenix is a flaccid, unimaginative cinematic venture that is truly unsatisfying in every single way. Even if you are a super hero fanatic, there is absolutely no reason to see this movie in the theatres or anywhere else for that matter. Sadly, this Phoenix was engulfed in the flames of its awfulness and avarice but was never able to rise from the ashes of its own failings and should be condemned to remain forever alone in the Dark…where it truly belongs.

©2019