more than a few people suggested that i watched the princess which is basically
medieval die hard with bruce willis played by joey king so i did how can i put this gently but
honestly i didn't feel like i was watching a movie but i don't mean that as a compliment i'm jill
bearup and my area of enthusiasm is stage combat which is to say theatrical violence in all of its
forms and i will tell you this the princess is absolutely a film you should watch if you are at
all interested in screen combat because it does a lot of things really well there's a but coming but
let's focus on the positives first okay the first lesson you will learn from the princess is that it
is entirely possible to have a lot of different fights which are nonetheless reasonably distinct
from each other even if they mostly involve the same kind of characters you have the princess
and maybe a friend and she's fighting some dudes or a dude or possibly a lady but mostly it's some
dudes and they managed to do something different in all of the fights by switching up the weapons
the environment all of the things that you can find in that environment etc this is to the film's
credit because there are a lot of fights in this 90-minute film the second lesson you can take from
the princess is that it is entirely possible to stage a fight for film that is readable and
coherent and interesting to your audience one thing i particularly like is when the camera moves
with joey king's center so we follow the princess through the moves rather than just being static
outside observers that was very nice i like that i would like to see more of that the third lesson
is that you can absolutely have a small woman beat down large numbers of dudes and have it feel
justified in this film the princess does a fair amount of punching of men but this very rarely
does more than just slow them down almost every takedown or death uses a weapon either improvised
from around her or an actual weapon or uses the environment to her advantage i was genuinely
impressed that there were a couple of times that there was a sword clash and the princess was just
thrown back by the superior size and weight of her opponent and you feel like she's
earned the victories more when she's taking advantage of her smaller size and her agility
and using all of the weapons available to her in order to win the fights it also helps that
in story these men are probably not supposed to kill her and they probably know that
the fourth lesson is that you cannot slice through plate armor with a sword exactly how vulnerable
one's underarms would be with a full hauberk on is perhaps another question but you know what
i appreciate when people make the effort and they made the effort to show that plate armor
is actually very tough and you can't just slash your way through it with a sword points for that
the fifth lesson is that your costuming can be a demonstration of your character's practicality as
well as looking cool she starts in a ridiculously poofy flowy sleeved wedding dress which she
gradually rips and tears to make more manageable to bind up wounds and to use as a weapon she gets
a sword belt and some sensible boots fairly early on and near the end she gets some armor which is
i mean it's okay you know what you do you the point is that they make the effort to show her
progression down the tower and towards her goal both in terms of what her costume looks like
how bedraggled she is and how injured she is you should definitely watch the princess if you are
interested in choreographing fights which take the physicality of the characters into account
and make really good use of their environment but basically as a movie it's like someone mashed
together a fight reel with a video game with a tumblr post about a self-rescuing princess that
is the depth of backstory and world building that we have here and so it doesn't feel like
a movie it feels like the skeleton of a movie the world they inhabit feels very fairy tale
but in a very generic kind of way and you could get away with that generic feel if it were an
actual fairy tale and it was in a book where there were only a few pictures or perhaps if
this was a children's movie but in a world with this level of blood and injury detail
we're expecting some more world building detail you know maybe a touch more coherent backstory
detail wouldn't go amiss either i mean is this our world i guess i mean it has a christian priest in
it i think it seems vaguely medieval inspired and nobody seems to have any magic powers other than
the magic power of not dying of infection after you've been stabbed and then waded through a sewer
if there's a sixth lesson here it's that cool fights don't necessarily make a movie that i'm
actually going to want to watch more than once the reason i like the princess bride or pirates
of the caribbean is that they give me characters to root for the princess is a movie that gives me
a single character to root for and she's not really so much a character as she is
an archetype there's some vague flashback stuff about her training to fight and her history and
how true warriors strength comes from the heart or something but really it's a it's a fairly flimsy
skeleton onto which they're hanging all of these fights and the fights do look great but if you've
been here any length of time you're probably sick of hearing me saying that fights are there to
serve the story and the story is at least for my taste a little bit thin on the ground i'd rather
have a compelling story and fights which look like the sword's way as much as toddlers and you hope
then fights which look awesome but don't have a story to add to your fights should do some of the
work of character building but they cannot do all of the work of character building and these ones
are having to try the most accurate summation i can give you is this i feel the same way about
the fights in the princess now as i did when i saw each of them as individual clips in the trailers
wow these look great very creatively put together well shot occasionally amusing but i watch films
mainly for the characters and the story and the payoffs which come from that you may not and
that's okay too but for most people if having the full context of the film doesn't improve
or change in any way how they view the fights then i would suggest that perhaps you have built
your castle on sand pun fully intended for some fights i like rather better check next to my face