‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Review: A Boring Queer Rom-Com
Despite a committed performance from Taylor Zakhar Perez, Red, White & Royal Blue’s Hallmark-lite aesthetic ruins anything it tries to establish.
Queer cinema deserves better than Amazon’s Red, White & Royal Blue, the softest (and most uneventful) R-rated gay movie I’ve ever seen. With a rating like that, you would think it would push the boundaries of mainstream queer cinema like Batman Forever and Batman & Robin did in their respective years. Why am I talking about these movies when their queer subtext is still debated among film fans, critics, and academics? I wouldn’t have brought it up had the film not hired Stephen Goldblatt as its cinematographer, who shot both Joel Schumacher’s Batman films and gave us the most potent image in any queer film ever made:
For many queer kids who grew up in the 1990s, this shot of Chris O’Donnell’s perfectly constructed body as Robin in Batman Forever was their sexual awakening. The hand-clasp between Val Kilmer’s Batman and Robin after both characters expressed their admiration for one another (“A man’s gotta go his own way…a friend taught me that. Not just a friend…a partner.”) also made them feel something. I don’t believe it’s an unintentional choice to have him shoot Red, White & Royal Blue, which transcends the friendship between Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez) and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine) into a full-fledged love story, but why did it have to look this lethargic and monotonous?
There is no sense of energy behind Goldblatt’s lens, giving this sluggish 121-minute-long rom-com its Hallmark aesthetic. Green screens are amazingly obvious, the camera’s horizon is always in the middle, and the framing between Alex and Henry is never sexually charged, compared to when Goldblatt (and Joel Schumacher) framed the quasi-tension between Batman and Robin in their adaptations. Red, White & Royal Blue’s major sex scene, which likely garnered its R-rating, lacks any romantic power. The blocking never frames the two in a way that makes sense, but the energy from the two actors are complete opposites, so you never understand why the two started to fall in love.
Alex is the son of U.S. President Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman), the first woman to be elected President in this fictionalized world. At the same time, Henry is an English prince whose family cannot discover his sexuality (in this film, Stephen Fry, an openly gay man, plays Henry’s homophobic grandfather and King of England). The two become friends after a wedding incident causes them to spend more time together to save the face of the U.S. President and the Royal Family…until Henry kisses Alex at New Year’s. Then, they become infatuated with each other, and the major clichés begin there.
Some will argue that queer people never got their mainstream Hallmark-lite comedy, which is fair. But Hallmark comedies usually have more camp than this, and the actors who fall in love with each other are a perfect match. Zakhar Perez and Galitzine aren’t. Zakhar Perez is highly charismatic and was the best part of the dreary Kissing Booth sequels. He brings this level of charm in Red, White & Royal Blue as Alex to great effect, and shares palpable chemistry with his parents, respectively played by Thurman and Clifton Collins Jr. I can’t say the same thing about Thurman’s portrayal of the U.S. President: she looks completely bored throughout the entire thing, even during the important scene of her son coming out.
On the other hand, Galitzine seems so distanced from Zakhar Perez that he can never exude the same charm and passion The Kissing Booth 2 actor brings on screen. As such, their match doesn’t work. Sure, it doesn’t help that it’s written in such a way that you see every single story beat coming (especially when the film introduces a Politico journalist who attempts to bring the President down through her son’s [private] queer relationship, which sees MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid cameo). However, it would’ve been far more watchable had their chemistry worked somewhat. However, the two are so far apart in personalities that you never once buy their on-screen relationship.
It also doesn’t help that the film is way too long, at 121 minutes. A comedy like this should’ve been a lean and effective 95-100 minutes, where we see the highs and lows of Alex and Henry’s relationship. However, the film meanders quite a bit and involves too many subplots for the audience to invest themselves in the relationship. One subplot sees Alex go to Texas to flip the state from red to blue for the upcoming presidential election. It’s important for its ending, but the film spends far too much time there than it should. There’s also the aforementioned Politico journalist (played here by Juan Castano), who unfortunately adds nothing to the film and is completely dropped from the main storyline after something pretty major occurs between the two characters caused by the journalist! You would think the film would have the decency to bring him up again, but it never does.
Because of this, Red, White & Royal Blue fails at being a fun romantic comedy and also purely romantic. The energy isn’t there in front and behind the camera. I’ll seemingly never forgive director Matthew López, in his feature directorial debut, for teaming up with cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt to produce flat images. At the same time, the man changed the course of queer cinema for the better with Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. And if you think the latter film is one of the worst movies of all time, allow me to break the ice: it never was.