Diplomatic relations
So, here’s the thing. An adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel Red, White, and Royal Blue is kind of a gimme for any filmmaker. It comes ready-made with a strong plot hook (the son of the U.S. president falls in love with his rival, the grandson of the British monarch), two handsome and charismatic male leads, and a boatload of sex appeal (70% of the book is McQuiston slamming the characters together like two naked Barbie dolls). Short of making an out-and-out softcore porn movie, some elements of the book would have to be sanded down to make a feature film, but it would take a bare minimum amount of effort to make something watchable out of it. Unfortunately, the bare minimum is exactly what we get here.
Co-written and directed by playwright Matthew López, the Prime Video exclusive Red, White, & Royal Blue takes roughly the same shape as the novel. Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez) is the son of Texas-born President Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman channeling Foghorn Leghorn) and he's bisexual on the down-low. Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine, who you may remember for drawing Tim's ire in Cinderella 2021) is the spare heir to the British throne and still reeling a bit from his father's recent death. Alex hates Henry because he thinks he's a pompous prat. Henry hates Alex because Alex is mean to him. However, a horseplay incident at a royal wedding leads to both of them on the floor, covered in £75,000 worth of wedding cake.
To recover from this international scandal (and help boost Ellen Claremont's profile during her campaign for re-election), Alex is forced to make nice with Henry and fake a friendship with him in the public eye. As they get to know one another better, they grow closer. Close enough to touch butts. Pretty soon, their friendship is still faked for the cameras, but instead of masking their animosity, it's hiding the lusty, torrid affair that's going on behind the scenes. But how long can they keep their love a secret? Will it have consequences that rock the globe? And why is a castle crudely photoshopped into the background of this promotional photo of the scene where they're on a Texas lake?
In terms of delivering its romantic storyline, Red, White, & Royal Blue is mostly competent, but never much more than that. It only truly shines in one scene on a dance floor that provides a modern reimagining of the Pride and Prejudice 2005 ballroom sequence with Lizzy and Darcy. Otherwise, it shuffles through its series of romantic drama beats with efficiency if not much vigor (any particularly emotional scene feels like it comes out of nowhere).
The "com" half of the rom-com gets dropped pretty early, unfortunately. The best of those moments come in the prickly early relationship between the duo. Once they've fallen hard for one another, the screenplay resorts to leaning way too hard on the character of the foul-mouthed Deputy Chief of Staff Zara (Sarah Shahi), who the movie seems to be very proud of despite her never once feeling like an actual human.
A movie like this (especially one where any and all side characters are greatly reduced from their stature in the book) lives and dies on its leads. And they're... competent. Taylor Zakhar Perez seems to have read the word "charming" in the character description and let his character work stop there, flashing a teeth-gnashing smile every opportunity he gets and otherwise giving what would be the best performance in a Disney Channel original movie. This leaves Galitzine to pick up the slack, and he mostly does, adding a lot to Henry that isn't in the script, though he also leans hard on one particular acting trick, in his case letting his watery, watery eyes well with tears as he stares off into the middle distance.
Plus, neither actor can figure out what to do when the screenplay gets more self-consciously literary, which thankfully doesn't happen too often. To be fair, I don't think even Meryl Streep could convincingly deliver the line "I will no longer be the Prince of Shame!"
As prurient as it sounds, most of the sins of the movie would have been washed away if they had just committed to letting these characters have a lot of sex (which, I reiterate, would be the only way to accurately adapt the book). Aside from one sex scene that somehow manages to be both cheesy and linger on a realistic depiction of the bottoming partner's face during insertion, the movie otherwise runs and hides every time something remotely dirty might be about to happen.
Look, I appreciate that the smash cut to the Washington Monument is a pretty cheeky answer to Hitchcock's whole train tunnel metaphor (later there's also a tremendous bit of phallic visual metaphor involving the Eiffel Tower that I will not slander whatsoever). But it's 2023. A smash cut after like three shirt buttons are undone just feels cowardly. And this happens over and over again. It's OK for movies to not have a lot of sex. But the end result here is that this steamy romantic comedy is dry as a bone, keeps genuine romance at a low simmer, and just really isn't all that fun after the zippy first act. What does that leave us with, I ask you?
Let me answer you. What's left is some tremendously effortful filmmaking that makes the wrong decision almost every time it's asked to present us with something more than a shot-reverse-shot setup. And it doesn't even get that right all the time. There is a bizarre moment where a coworker knocks on the wall of a glass office and the coworker doesn't even seem to be in the same dimension as the characters inside the office. The 180-degree line isn't so much crossed as it is nuked from orbit.
The movie also cannot figure out how to depict texts and emails onscreen. In the space of a single montage, it tries out three or four different styles. A huge amount of different graphics fly around the screen, criss-crossing with voiceovers, texts with a far too tiny font to read, and an imaginary Henry teleporting in and out of Alex's day. It renders everything an illegible hash to the point that, by the time Henry is diegetically talking to Alex on speakerphone, the movie has completely removed your ability to parse how the fuck they're actually communicating.
At least this is a catastrophe that resulted from the filmmakers actually trying something. One place where they didn't try even a little bit was making their English filming locations look even one little bit like Washington, D.C. at any time of year. The faux backdrops outside the Oval Office wouldn't pass muster in the Disney Hall of Presidents, any time a D.C. or Texas street is shown it shines with a garish post-apocalyptic radioactive glow, and the White House more often than not looks like a LEGO brick parked in front of a screensaver from 1995. Even the night sky outside a window with closed curtains fails to look convincing in one scene.
All told, Red, White, & Royal Blue feels very much like a streaming original and not a proper movie by any stretch of the imagination. It could have gotten to that level with a few tweaks and a director for whom this isn't their first rodeo. But, assuming you find filmmaking flubs as interesting as I do, it is at least never boring. Its two-hour running time zips by, and while I doubt you'll find any reason to get emotionally invested in it, it's got just enough bubblegum flavor that it'll satisfy the rom-com sweet tooth of anyone who's already seen all the classics 800 times and needs to feel the rush of something new.
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.
Co-written and directed by playwright Matthew López, the Prime Video exclusive Red, White, & Royal Blue takes roughly the same shape as the novel. Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez) is the son of Texas-born President Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman channeling Foghorn Leghorn) and he's bisexual on the down-low. Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine, who you may remember for drawing Tim's ire in Cinderella 2021) is the spare heir to the British throne and still reeling a bit from his father's recent death. Alex hates Henry because he thinks he's a pompous prat. Henry hates Alex because Alex is mean to him. However, a horseplay incident at a royal wedding leads to both of them on the floor, covered in £75,000 worth of wedding cake.
To recover from this international scandal (and help boost Ellen Claremont's profile during her campaign for re-election), Alex is forced to make nice with Henry and fake a friendship with him in the public eye. As they get to know one another better, they grow closer. Close enough to touch butts. Pretty soon, their friendship is still faked for the cameras, but instead of masking their animosity, it's hiding the lusty, torrid affair that's going on behind the scenes. But how long can they keep their love a secret? Will it have consequences that rock the globe? And why is a castle crudely photoshopped into the background of this promotional photo of the scene where they're on a Texas lake?
In terms of delivering its romantic storyline, Red, White, & Royal Blue is mostly competent, but never much more than that. It only truly shines in one scene on a dance floor that provides a modern reimagining of the Pride and Prejudice 2005 ballroom sequence with Lizzy and Darcy. Otherwise, it shuffles through its series of romantic drama beats with efficiency if not much vigor (any particularly emotional scene feels like it comes out of nowhere).
The "com" half of the rom-com gets dropped pretty early, unfortunately. The best of those moments come in the prickly early relationship between the duo. Once they've fallen hard for one another, the screenplay resorts to leaning way too hard on the character of the foul-mouthed Deputy Chief of Staff Zara (Sarah Shahi), who the movie seems to be very proud of despite her never once feeling like an actual human.
A movie like this (especially one where any and all side characters are greatly reduced from their stature in the book) lives and dies on its leads. And they're... competent. Taylor Zakhar Perez seems to have read the word "charming" in the character description and let his character work stop there, flashing a teeth-gnashing smile every opportunity he gets and otherwise giving what would be the best performance in a Disney Channel original movie. This leaves Galitzine to pick up the slack, and he mostly does, adding a lot to Henry that isn't in the script, though he also leans hard on one particular acting trick, in his case letting his watery, watery eyes well with tears as he stares off into the middle distance.
Plus, neither actor can figure out what to do when the screenplay gets more self-consciously literary, which thankfully doesn't happen too often. To be fair, I don't think even Meryl Streep could convincingly deliver the line "I will no longer be the Prince of Shame!"
As prurient as it sounds, most of the sins of the movie would have been washed away if they had just committed to letting these characters have a lot of sex (which, I reiterate, would be the only way to accurately adapt the book). Aside from one sex scene that somehow manages to be both cheesy and linger on a realistic depiction of the bottoming partner's face during insertion, the movie otherwise runs and hides every time something remotely dirty might be about to happen.
Look, I appreciate that the smash cut to the Washington Monument is a pretty cheeky answer to Hitchcock's whole train tunnel metaphor (later there's also a tremendous bit of phallic visual metaphor involving the Eiffel Tower that I will not slander whatsoever). But it's 2023. A smash cut after like three shirt buttons are undone just feels cowardly. And this happens over and over again. It's OK for movies to not have a lot of sex. But the end result here is that this steamy romantic comedy is dry as a bone, keeps genuine romance at a low simmer, and just really isn't all that fun after the zippy first act. What does that leave us with, I ask you?
Let me answer you. What's left is some tremendously effortful filmmaking that makes the wrong decision almost every time it's asked to present us with something more than a shot-reverse-shot setup. And it doesn't even get that right all the time. There is a bizarre moment where a coworker knocks on the wall of a glass office and the coworker doesn't even seem to be in the same dimension as the characters inside the office. The 180-degree line isn't so much crossed as it is nuked from orbit.
The movie also cannot figure out how to depict texts and emails onscreen. In the space of a single montage, it tries out three or four different styles. A huge amount of different graphics fly around the screen, criss-crossing with voiceovers, texts with a far too tiny font to read, and an imaginary Henry teleporting in and out of Alex's day. It renders everything an illegible hash to the point that, by the time Henry is diegetically talking to Alex on speakerphone, the movie has completely removed your ability to parse how the fuck they're actually communicating.
At least this is a catastrophe that resulted from the filmmakers actually trying something. One place where they didn't try even a little bit was making their English filming locations look even one little bit like Washington, D.C. at any time of year. The faux backdrops outside the Oval Office wouldn't pass muster in the Disney Hall of Presidents, any time a D.C. or Texas street is shown it shines with a garish post-apocalyptic radioactive glow, and the White House more often than not looks like a LEGO brick parked in front of a screensaver from 1995. Even the night sky outside a window with closed curtains fails to look convincing in one scene.
All told, Red, White, & Royal Blue feels very much like a streaming original and not a proper movie by any stretch of the imagination. It could have gotten to that level with a few tweaks and a director for whom this isn't their first rodeo. But, assuming you find filmmaking flubs as interesting as I do, it is at least never boring. Its two-hour running time zips by, and while I doubt you'll find any reason to get emotionally invested in it, it's got just enough bubblegum flavor that it'll satisfy the rom-com sweet tooth of anyone who's already seen all the classics 800 times and needs to feel the rush of something new.
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.
Categories: love stories, romcoms
