Review: Jesus and Charles Dickens aren't quite a match made in Heaven

When I first heard about The King of Kings, it made my head spin a little bit. It's a movie about Charles Dickens telling his youngest son, the King Arthur-obsessed Walter, about the life of Jesus. I was just like...why? It felt so random. I thought maybe it was a Christmas Carol-adjacent thing, where they're visiting scenes of Jesus's life a la Scrooge time-traveling. That was about all I could muster as a guess. Silly me should've just Googled it, because it ends up Dickens wrote a book about Jesus's life for his kids, which he would read to them every Christmas. It was published decades after his death. Who knew! (Probably English majors, I don't know.)

So, I didn't exactly go into this movie with...*ahem*...great expectations, which is all as well, because it wouldn't have lived up to any. Even armed with the real-world knowledge that fuels the movie's framing, that framing still feels weird, and is deployed haphazardly, ineffectively. And the story of Jesus's life has been told so many times, in so many ways, that this version never really pops. It's very straight-faced, very straight-on, with nary a flourish or a joke to be found. I understand that this is a faith-based movie that is ultimately hoping to win over young viewers and make them interested in Christianity. That's fine, but I would have to imagine that any non-Christian kids aren't going to find this telling terribly persuasive. Maybe I'm not a good judge for that, being in my thirties and having been raised in a Christian household, meaning these stories have been embedded in my brain since a very young age. So I was pretty bored through this whole thing.

Even for kids who are already Saved™,  I have to imagine this isn't super compelling. When I was a kid, we had a lot of great Christian entertainment. VeggieTales, McGee and Me!, The Storykeepers, probably other stuff I'm forgetting. I was raised on a balanced diet of Christian-y entertainment and more mainstream fare, and found a lot to enjoy in both. Christian kids deserve good movies, TV shows, music, whatever. And they obviously do get some. A couple years ago, Journey to Nazareth was a great example of putting a modern, fun spin on a familiar story, adding peppy songs and some goofy humor to the Nativity tale. Last year, The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever made me laugh and cry in equal measure, thanks to its big-hearted earnestness. 

And I think it's smart for faith-based studios -- like this movie's Angel Studios, which has delivered some big hits in recent years -- to make a move into animation, since that's a market where, theatrically at least, there hasn't been much religious fare. But The King of Kings is, unfortunately, mostly a resounding dud.

The film opens with Charles Dickens (voiced by Kenneth Branagh, leading a pretty stellar cast) performing a dramatic reading of A Christmas Carol to a packed theater. Chaos ensues because of young Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and his rowdy cat, whose backstage antics stop the show in its tracks. Before you know it, the pages of Dickens' Jesus book are flying all over the place. It's clumsy table-setting. Why are the kids even there? Why is the manuscript? Just because the movie needs to put these pieces in place to get the ball rolling. Fine.

The meat of the movie is Dickens, after returning home in a huff, telling the story of Jesus to young Walter. This is the best story about a king ever, he says, and the basis for the King Arthur legend, to boot! 

Which brings me to maybe my biggest issue with this movie, particularly with the framing. If the story of Jesus is so important to Charles Dickens and his wife, important enough for him to write an entire book about it, why have his kids never heard this story before? Do they not go to church? Do they not ever talk about Jesus at Christmas, or ever? It's bizarre that Walter is wide-eyed, slack-jawed at every little detail of Jesus's life. Whoa, he was born in a manger??? He died and came back to life??? Like, no shit, Sherlock, where have you been? Charles Dickens, I think you're a bad Christian!

Whatever. Again, the movie needs to do what it needs to do to do what it wants to do. And that sort os string-pulling is so annoying, especially when it's this glaring. But we eventually get into it, and then we get the Greatest Hits of the Christ: the Nativity, child Jesus preaching in the temple, the Disciples, the miracles, Lazarus, Pilate, on and on. We occasionally cut back to the Dickens family (Mom helps tell the story, too) in the study, but more often Charles and Walter are there amongst the characters, sometimes interacting with them (?), sometimes clearly invisible. The blurred lines of what's actually happening, when they can be seen, etc. are frustrating, too, and lead to some bizarre moments, like when Walter sees his dad literally as Jesus. Or when Charles just disappears for the last few scenes of Jesus's life, leaving Walter to have to grapple with all that horrifying stuff on his own. Strange!

One of the film's great boons is having Oscar Isaac playing Jesus. His work is the best in the movie, and it sometimes feels like he's channeling Willem Dafoe's work in The Last Temptation of Christ. He's calming but powerful, a bit of darkness, a nice edge. Sexy, obviously. Jesus is maybe the only good-looking character in the movie. This has that style where the characters sort of look like they're carved out of wood, lots of severe noses and heavy brows, that's sometimes appealing but kind of ugly, too. Early on, I was thinking how crazy it is that a (presumably) small-budgeted movie still manages to look this good. Like even our dollar-bin animation has a nice shine to it. Here, there are some beautiful, colorful lighting choices that I dug, and a couple scenes that go hard. The walking on water scene is a serve, and I was kind of impressed they did the scene of demons being cast into pigs which immediately commit suicide, once of the weirder miracles.

And honestly, this movie is a good reminder that the Bible is full of weird and cool and interesting stories that could make for some killer movies, but also about the difficulty of those adaptations being made with the artistic flair that they might need to really go off. I think artists who are trying to be faithful to the (Good) Book probably end up a little handcuffed creatively. They can't go too far off-script lest they anger their core audience. It's a tough spot to be in, and I think probably part of the reason the Bible doesn't get tapped as much as it could, or maybe even should. Maybe the animated movie about David coming out later this year will fare better?

Last note: when I booked my ticket for this, I was floored at the listed runtime: 110 minutes. Ends up the movie is closer to 95 or so. Once the credits roll, an ominous warning appears in the corner of the screen about a special message coming up in three minutes. Ends up it's one of those laundering schemes where you "pay it forward" by buying tickets for imaginary children who may or may not see the movie to help boost the movie's box office. Accompanied by testimonials by kids saying how good the movie is and how every kid should see it (shout out to the little girl who said her favorite part of the movie is when the cat meowed because...same). Paired with the Kristin Chenoweth (?!) song that plays over the credits, it made for a bizarre ending that was honestly more interesting than the movie that preceded it.