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THE KING IS ALIVE Send This Review to a Friend
This film certainly isn't alive. It is dead, dead, dead despite the pretentious efforts to create emotional fireworks in this product of the Dogma 95 film group that took a "Vow of Chastity" pledging in a 10-point plan to avoid conventions of modern filmmaking. Previous successes aside, this time the dogmatic approach is carried to an extreme with awful results. Among other problems, the film is relentlessly ugly when it comes to its character close-ups. Would a little more lighting have hurt?
Those who suffer the most are the cast members, who look painfully unattractive, and that is something difficult to accomplish with the likes of Janet McTeer, Jennfer Jason Leigh, and Romane Bohringer. The set-up involves a group of tourists on a bus that breaks down, leaving them stranded in a Zimbabwe desert and in grave danger if not discovered and rescued soon. To pass the time they decide to put on a play, "King Lear" no less. Where are Mickey and Judy when we need them?
Under the threat of starvation and death, the characters are wracked by the festering problems in their respective lives and their worst traits surge to the surface. Terrible things happen and whoever survives will never be the same.
But let's not worry about their fate. It's the audience that needs rescuing the most. The cast trying to make sense of the dreary material even more drearily directed and co-written by Kristian Levring also includes Miles Anderson, David Bradley, David Calder, Bruce Davison, Brion James, Peter Kubheka, Vusi Kunene, Chris Walker and Lia Williams. A Newmarket and Good Machine release.
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