2 out of 5

Directed by: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

While it can rarely be the case that one identifiable thing goes “wrong” with a movie, having one or two main callouts that moreso affect the rest can feel like an approachable – and logical – narrative. And approaching it like this can also bring out the brighter sides of a project: solid direction can elevate a poor script; a good script can still hold interest if poorly performed; and however many variations inbetween.

But as I struggled to navigate that map of pluses and minuses for Damsel, the Millie Bobby Brown vehicle in which we’re promised dragons and a sword-swinging Brown, I kept coming back around to an overarching feeling: that everything went at least a little wrong with the movie, and that it’s pretty clear from the outset.

Damsel, written and directed by creatives who, oddly, both not had many feature length projects since a decade prior – director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo with a couple of TV credits in between, but otherwise their last film was Intruders in 2011; writer Dan Mezau popped up on “Fast X” the year before… and then (god bless him) Wrath of the Titans before that – clearly wants to play with some Game of Thrones’ fantasy tropes, using the springboard of the triggering title to center a story around a princess-to-be who’s doing-it-for-herself, and, visually, trying to find some balance between over prettified Lord of the Ringscapes and some pretty appreciably callous killings, a la Thrones, with a probably modest B-tier blockbuster budget allowing for grand, but empty feeling locations. The top down vibe is good, and – if clunky – the fairly slow roll to the movie’s first twist is, if not always great, committed. Like, the film is trying to do something.

But it should be noted that cracks show throughout this first portion, and pretty big ones: setting aside budget limitations, movies that scripted with the kind of hurry-up-and-wait style of Damsel remind me of how spoiled we’ve been by TV, when 90-effing-minute movies were able to properly compress pretty big tales some decades ago, and do so while maintaining stakes and a sense of characterization. Whether it’s second-screen writing, or production mandates, or something else, Damsel is of the variety of scripting and visual storytelling where you keep questioning: “Is what we’re hearing / seeing important?” paired with “Is that very obvious thing they’re not saying / showing supposed to be a secret?”

We watch a king try and fail to slay a dragon; we flash forward to Elodie (Brown) in a supposed faraway time and place being told she’s being wed off to a prince to save her struggling town; and the separation between these events are… nonexistent. There is no “long ago” and “far away,” and some prattle about doing chores and people leaving the town are the barebones necessities to lay out why this marriage is happening. This is, essentially, a pattern that’s repeated throughout Damsel, where events carry no weight in part because the accompanying dialogue is just workman lines to get the exposition out there, and then in part because the visual scene-setting is of the same variety: we need X scene to happen, so we need Y scene to place it in. None of this is organic.

It’s also quite miscast. Brown, as is her type, plays Elodie as snarky, but well-meaning; this works when paired with characters who are fueled by a sense of discovery, and while that is part of Elodie’s DNA, the part here requires something much more… internal. And that’s just not Brown’s brand, at least not at this point. (And this is where I kept cycling around on “who to blame,” because a director could’ve helped out here, but a script also needs to provide some basis…)

Angela Bassett plays Elodie’s stepmother, in another appreciated trope wiggle – she’s one of two stepmothers here, and they’re not all bad! – but, man, the stately accent thing just isn’t fitting here. She reads the part like a play; she’s rarely there.

Ray Winstone (Elodie’s father) and Nick Robinson as the prince – Elodie’s to-be – fare much better, because their parts / scenes allow for some acting to happen inbetween their lines. Moments between them and Brown thus work as well, and indicate that there definitely could’ve been a stronger movie here.

Through some double-dealing happenstance, Elodie finds herself trapped in a cave with a dragon for the back half of the movie, and some initially promising cat-and-mouse gets barreled over with a hurried escape montage, and increasing inconsistencies in the dragon’s threat level, as we start with every sound Elodie makes spelling her doom – to being able to stumble around and shout and the dragon’s like, boy, I wonder if there’s someone hiding behind that rock, oh well.

I’m avoiding one detail that may also make or break things for you, and it broke it for me: the dragon talks. If we needed any other indication that the movie’s crutch was going to be unnecessary exposition: yup. Shohreh Aghdashloo is, of course, everyone’s favorite person, but she’s not given a lot to work with here.

The effects are fine. They are janky where you’d expect, but the dragon design is okay, and I like that neither man nor beast is impervious throughout – like everyone keeps getting injured; no one turns into an outright superhero. (Though, as has been criticized elsewhere, this was discordant with how well Brown’s hair and makeup otherwise stayed in place.)

Conceptually strong, but with zero strong individual elements, Damsel essentially misfires in every category.