‘The King’s Daughter’ Review: Entertainment—and Coherence—Dethroned

At the center of the absurdity is the Sun King,

Louis XIV

—he’s played by

Pierce Brosnan,

whose facial expressions range from bored through scornful to acidic, as if he’s sucking on a slice of citron. Louis acts on two impulses that are simultaneous only because the script makes them so. Otherwise there would be no movie, which might be a good thing for moviegoers but not for the investors, who have waited many years for their overcooked turkey to be released. (It was originally called “The Moon and the Sun,” the title of the

Vonda N. McIntyre

novel from which it was adapted, and principal photography was completed in 2014.)

First Louis orders, for no apparent reason, that his illegitimate daughter be brought to Versailles from the convent where she has spent her life thus far. Then, seized by a desire to live forever, he sends an expedition to find the Lost City of Atlantis and bring back a mermaid whose body contains an eternal life force.

A life force is precisely what the movie lacks, notwithstanding the appealing presence of Kaya Scodelario, who plays the daughter, Marie-Josèphe, and the voice of

Julie Andrews,

who contributes a few blissed-out paragraphs as narrator. The direction, by

Sean McNamara,

alternates between snoozeful and agitated, with no nuance in between. Members of the supporting cast, led by

William Hurt

—a last-minute replacement for another actor who dropped out—camp it up when their energy hasn’t completely run down. The mermaid, played by the Chinese actress and pop singer

Fan Bingbing,

draws her energy from digital effects. She’s downright phosphorescent, a helpless captive confined to a pool in a grotto that evokes the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills except for a number of complicated mechanisms, made of wood, that serve no comprehensible purpose.

To be fair, the king’s twin impulses eventually lead to a sort of aqueous sisterhood. Marie-Josèphe is as much at home in the water as the mermaid, coming as she does from a convent overlooking the ocean. The two women join forces against the king’s desire to pimp his daughter out to a rich aristocrat, and the royal physician’s plan to separate the mermaid from whatever internal organs contain her magical power. By saying that, though, I seem to be suggesting that one thing follows another logically, which is far from the case. My fantasy about why the fantasy on screen turned out to be such a disconnected jumble is that an office boy charged with making copies of the script lost half of the pages but didn’t notice because he was consumed by his dreams of becoming a studio chief. Be that as it may, jumble is putting it generously. Instead of “The Shape of Water” this is a stream of drivel.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com