Rent Kings (2017)

Kings review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

This is a joke, right? To describe the plot of Kings is like telling a stand-up bit about an out-of-touch European director making an American movie. Here’s the pitch: You have Halle Berry and Daniel Craig, two fine looking and sexy actors, thrown together in a romance with much comedy and slapstick where they find themselves in awkward situations. But the twist is that they do all this around the fury and horror of the Rodney King riots. There was an executive somewhere who heard this and said, “Sounds good, keep talking.”

I still can’t wrap my brain around this concept. Starting off before the riots, Berry plays a mother of too many kids and wants to take in more that are not cared for. Social services won’t let her, but she presses on with a job that doesn’t allow her to be there often and a tension brewing in the streets of the Rodney King trial. Her next door neighbor (Craig) grows irritated with her children causing a ruckus and disturbing his writing. But he’s got a strong enough heart that he’ll not only take the kids in when things get rough for Berry but dance and sing with them as well.

Seems like a decent romance, but hold on. Once the Rodney King riots begin, the film doesn’t so much change in tone as it does mutate to keep the rom-com angle going. Consider the scene where Berry dashes out into the street to stop a young man from being unfairly arrested and ends up in the cop car herself. She is handcuffed but dumped in the street by the cops that have bigger targets to arrest. Craig finds her on the street, hobbling with handcuffs while violence is breaking out in the streets. He greets her with a cocky smile as though she were talking the walk of shame after a frat party. She returns home to her children crying and terrified of being left alone, but Craig still finds the fun in cracking her handcuffs and having a beer.

Oh, and you gotta love the Adventures in Babysitting style moment when Craig and Berry are handcuffed to a light post and have to get uncomfortably close to escape, while Berry’s children attempt to drive a car in the background. It should be mentioned that they were handcuffed there by an angry cop who almost shot them as violently spit racist remarks at them.

Paralleling this confounding romance is the story of one of Berry’s teenage sons venturing down a path of crime. He associates with the wrong crowd, going through rites of violence and immorality to prove himself as a gangster. And when the riots break out, he finds himself running for his life in a neighborhood on fire, bullets blazing, chaos all around him. It’s terrifying when he drives through the smoke-infested streets while angry citizens shoot at him; some cops, others gangs. And to think, while the teenager is shot and bleeding, Berry and Craig are comically bonding over handcuffs.

Kings is the type of film you just know wasn’t made by an American the way it approaches a part of American history with more movie-magic pitch than any perspective. In addition to the movie pitch sounding as dumb as I theorized, I just imagine a heavy-accented string of buzzwords to convince producers to go along with this film. Craig! Berry! Romantic chemistry! Drama! American racial event! And in that cobbling of juicy movie elements bore a picture so messy and off in tone it’s not just a bad movie, but an insulting one to the true hell of the Rodney King riots where many people were hurt in more ways than one. Such an event should be used for more than a lame excuse of a romantic comedy.