Red, White & Royal Blue

Right, I am not the demographic and I ought to have hated this. Not least because it starts off with one of my lazy cinema writing bête noires - the "King of England". There is no such title or person! Anyway, pretty swiftly we find ourselves watching an overly contrived cake incident that must have trashed the expensive shag pile at Buckingham Palace. The visiting son of the US President - "Alex" (Taylor Zakhar Perez) gets involved in an altercation with Prince Henry, the grandson of the King. A week later he is despatched by his mother (Uma Thurman) on a diplomatic rescue mission ahead of her looming re-election battle and negotiations for a trade deal. What now ensues is way better than I was expecting. It's a simple enough bromance/rom-...

There are three things necessary to make a gay romantic comedy work: It needs to involve a readily recognizable gay relationship, it needs an undeniable sense of romance and it has to be funny. However, this heavily diluted, glacially paced piece of insipid celluloid fluff has none of the above, and it truly escapes me how many critics and viewers have found this utterly bland exercise to be heartwarming, charming and involving. In telling the somewhat far-fetched story of an alleged romance between a British prince and the son of an American president who start out as comically exaggerated adversaries but end up supposedly finding true love with one another, writer-director Matthew López subjects his audiences to an unconvincing relationsh...

Everything about 'Red, White & Royal Blue' screams bad movie, yet somehow it manages to make itself watchable.

I've not entirely sure how, as there honestly isn't one element of it that I'd class as absolutely good. The run time is too long, the acting is just OK, the story is (or should be, I guess) lousy and the dialogue is genuinely terrible, like toe-curlingly so. It, too, has the cheap feel of a Hallmark-esque film, well without that company's obligatory straightness, obvs. However, there's no doubting they make it work.

I haven't got anything more to add, doing so would just be listing further reasons why this should suck but, evidently, doesn't. Pardon (the turkey?...) the pun btw.