So, I've been working the "shitty direct-to-Netflix romcom" beat for a while, and I'm usually as happy as a pig in slop. I like to get my hands dirty digging through the mud of smooth and shiny bland filmmaking and root out the gems. Or, more frequently, the gnarled potatoes that are shaped funny and thus amusing to look at. But as I write this review I'm tempted to go full Hannah Gadsby and announce my retirement. The Royal Treatment nearly broke me.

I don't mean to say that The Royal Treatment is particularly bad. No, it doesn't do us the honor of being bad. It's so precisely manufactured to slide right off your brain that applying critical analysis to it was an actively painful procedure. To relieve some of this pressure off my brainpan, I'm going to distract myself by briefly discussing the plot.

Izzy (Laura Marano) is an Italian-American hairdresser in New York City. Oh, sorry, I meant "Noo Yawk fuhgeddaboudit I'm walking here!" She is what the Netflix description charitably describes as "outspoken," rather than "pantomime Italian." When through a comedy of errors that is too tortured to explain she is asked to do the hair of the visiting Prince Thomas (Mena Massoud), she explodes at him for not treating his help with respect and storms out mid-haircut. Of course, he is refreshed by her honesty and asks her and her team of chattering Italian hobgoblins to be the official hairdressers for his impending nuptials. When she is carted off to his castle in Lavania, of course she teaches him about how it's fun to be nice to poor people and he falls for her. She falls for him too because handsome prince. But what of the Prince's fiancée Lauren (Phoenix Connolly), an American heiress? Things couldn't possibly work out perfectly for everyone, could they? Spoiler alert: They could.

The Royal Treatment

First things first: Lavania. Like any Netflix movie featuring a prince, it's a continental European country where everyone is British (they even drop a reference to the nearby Aldovia, the principality in which the Christmas Prince from A Christmas Prince works his magic). This is all par for the course, except this time there are the added wrinkles of an Egyptian prince and plenty of signage in a Germanic language that everyone goes out of their way to pronounce improperly. These movies have historically had to make "third act of an exorcism movie" contortions to create their endless supply of princes, but these are by far the most geopolitically confounding.

That element is by far the one that generates the most sparks of "good-bad" enjoyment, especially when Izzy walks down an alley to Lavania's poor neighborhood, literally stepping over railroad tracks as she does so. There's also a shoehorned-in "save the community center" plot in which the movie more or less explicitly states that there are exactly three kids being helped by said community center. Unfortunately, this is where we hit the bottom of this film's capacity to spin bad screenwriting into golden lunacy.

The Royal Treatment is a goddamn chore, is what it is. You can hear the clangs and clanks as the track for every plot point is meticulously constructed an hour beforehand, and every character could be described with one word, and in case you missed that delicate craftsmanship, they busily announce their personality traits to each other. "I'm Italian," Izzy chirpily explains to a man she's known her entire life. A man who is also coming over to her mother's house for lasagna later.  I wish I was kidding. And later when she organizes a charity for the local Lavinian School for Sad Poor Children, she makes sure to cook them a big pot of spaghetti! In case you forgot she's Italian! But also we didn't want to Google any Italian dishes! There aren't even any meatballs!

The Royal Treatment

That is the point where the movie really stabs you in the brain with a fork and twirls. Up until then, one can expect to experience crushing boredom that is not alleviated by the constant, flop-sweaty "we're having fun" sequences, but not this kind of active brutality. The Royal Treatment isn't even saved by the chemistry between the two leads, which tends to be the only saving grace of this type of movie. Mena Massoud clearly went to the Lacey Chabert Hallmark School of Acting. By that I mean that his performance is perfectly calibrated to get in the way of the filmmaking process zero percent so as not to waste a single cent of a stretched-thin budget. You can tell he nailed it in one take every time, coasting on a baseline of charisma and handsomeness, but that's a different skill than actually being a genuinely compelling screen presence.

Laura Marano, on the other hand, drowns in a completely unforgiving role. She must somehow simultaneously play "I'm an angel fallen from Heaven with all the best ideas about everything" and "Big Apple yellow cab Coney Island pizza pie, betch!" and she nails neither of them. This is not her fault. The byzantine labyrinth of nonsense that is her character forces her to spit out dialogue at a manic rat-a-tat pace that poisons her entire performance. Literally before she even opened her mouth, I wrote in my notes, "this character is going to be a lot."

The Royal Treatment isn't even the worst movie I've seen from this corner of the cinema world. It's just so unforgivingly bland in the parts where it has any chance to be appealing that there's literally nothing to hold onto. There is nothing redeeming about this movie, not even as a "have it on in the background while you answer emails" white noise machine. Avoid at all costs.

Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.