It’s hard to tell a story about Jesus Christ that actually follows The Bible and fits into a single movie without making it feel like a greatest hits compilation. Oh look, here’s the part where Jesus walks on water. I love that one! Remember the bit about throwing stones? That’s in here too! They’re playing all the hits!
Well, they’re playing most of the hits. “The King of Kings” is a new animated retelling of the life of Christ, filtered through Charles Dickens’ interpretation of the so-called “Greatest Story Ever Told.” It’s a CG-animated film aimed at children and it’s less than two hours long, so it speeds past most of the Christ story episodically, giving kids the gist of it without engaging with most of The Bible’s big ideas in depth.
It’s no surprise that “The King of Kings” doesn’t have time for everything, but it’s still weird to consider everything the filmmakers thought it was okay to cut. A film about Jesus Christ with barely a mention of Mary Magdalene, the Sermon on the Mount or the whole “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” routine is a lot like “Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits” without “The Longest Time,” “Uptown Girl” or “Pressure.” The best a movie like that can do is “The Okay-est Story Ever Told.”
“The King of Kings” stars Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens, who the film portrays as a good Christian who cares deeply about The Bible (never mind his notorious adultery). Yet somehow this great Christian forgot to tell any of his children about Jesus, or anything else that happens in The Bible, for about ten years running. Literally, all his kids act like they’re hearing about this stuff for the very first time. When Dickens’ youngest child, Walter (Roman Griffin Davis), interrupts a live performance of “A Christmas Carol” with a lively-yet-inappropriate King Arthur cameo and a finicky comic relief cat named Willa (Dee Bradley Baker), Dickens’ wife Catherine (Uma Thurman) instructs him to tell Walter a story about the greatest king of all: “The King of Kings.”
So Charles gives Walter the gist of The New Testament, with Walter repeatedly interrupting like Fred Savage in “The Princess Bride,” asking when Jesus will do something truly heroic, like slay some dragons. It makes sense that Dickens would tailor this story to his hyper-specific, hyperactive audience, focusing on the melodramatic VFX-driven parts like dueling with the Devil in the desert, exorcising demons and raising the dead. After all, it’s hard to keep a little kid’s attention.
It’s harder still when your protagonist, Jesus Christ, is played like a wet blanket. Oscar Isaac voices the Son of God, and until the Passion he’s weirdly dispassionate, speaking most of his dialogue under his breath in a dull, serious monotone. When Jesus finally gets to do some “Acting” with a capital-A, his portrayal gets more involving, but the damage has already been done. It doesn’t help that he’s awkwardly visualized, dead-eyed and more of an idea than a character. Charles Dickens may be telling his son the story about the cool stuff Jesus did, but he’s not telling a very good story about Jesus as a person.
“The Kings of Kings” is directed and co-written by Seong-ho Jang, a visual effects artist with a quarter century of credits that include Park Chan-wook’s “Joint Security Area” and Jackie Chan’s “Chinese Zodiac.” The direction ranges from stodgy to competent, and for brief, noteworthy moments, it’s pretty grand. The moment when Walter accepts Jesus into his heart is heavy-handed yet moving. You’ll be forgiven for thinking that “The King of Kings,” despite all its flaws, was being completely genuine.
And then, of course, we find out otherwise. Just a short while after Jesus Christ rages at all the sinners who dared to turn his father’s temple into a marketplace, the movie concludes with a bunch of real children saying how much they loved the movie you just watched, which is hardly a sign of confidence on the part of the filmmakers. Worse yet, those same kids are also directed to tell the audience to give this studio extra money, because — as the children repeat — “Every kid should see this movie.”
Now granted, Angel Studios has been giving away tickets to see “The King of Kings”: one children’s ticket per adult ticket sold, which is nothing to sneeze at (but also isn’t technically following their claim of “Kids Go Free” to the letter, if we’re being honest about it). Nevertheless, it’s impossible to watch a film in which Jesus Christ says it’s wrong to profit from religion and then watch the filmmakers panhandle for profit at the end. At least, not without imagining the screen getting struck by lightning.
Maybe there’s a reason that “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” speech didn’t make the cut after all.