Kings review – Halle Berry and Daniel Craig fail to ignite baffling LA riots drama

The second feature from Mustang director Deniz Gamze Ergüven is a frustratingly made film with brief flashes of power but a lack of focus

Deniz Gamze Ergüven is the Turkish film-maker hugely admired for her 2015 debut feature Mustang, about five orphaned sisters growing up in a patriarchal society. Hopes were very high for this English-language followup here at Toronto, but the result is a baffling and frustrating disappointment. There are sparks of interest and some powerful moments, but it is structurally disjointed, tonally uncertain, unfocused and unfinished, with some very broad drama-improv-class acting from the kids and a frankly unrelaxed and undirected performance from Halle Berry.

The setting is Los Angeles, during the Rodney King riots, and the cops’ trials are forever on TV in the background. The title appears to merge Rodney’s surname with that of Martin Luther King Jr, and perhaps alludes to the heroic nobility of those hardworking people having to live their lives while dealing with racism. Halle Berry plays Millie, a woman in South Central who bakes and sells cakes while running in her apartment a refuge for runaways and disadvantaged kids. They range in age from around 6 or 7 to 15: the little kids are running around innocently enough, but the older teens are dealing with growing sexual feelings and the boys need some privacy in which to jerk off — another oddly misjudged comedy scene, adding to the weird cutesiness and playfulness which undermines the desperate seriousness of what is about to happen.

Millie is on her own, but she’s strangely attracted to the highly improbable hunk who lives next door, Obie, played with a Brit accent by Daniel Craig. (She has a fervent erotic dream about him, amusingly presented, and arguably no more random than anything else in this film.) Yet in the opening scene, Obie actually fires a pump-action shotgun out of his window, infuriated by the criminal disorder right by his house, so terrifyingly that Millie and the kids hide under their kitchen table. It sets his character up very strangely: we never see that gun, or really that temper, again.

When the riots begin, Millie is beside herself with worry, and in fact seems to be beside herself with worry most of the time, understandably enough. In the violent chaos she is arrested, but then finally thrown out of the squad car — in cuffs — when the cops realise they have something more important to deal with. Obie happens entirely fortuitously to be driving past as she staggers, shackled, down the street, and it is the chance for him to give some gallant help. But later she and Obie have to drive out to stop their kids from looting some store, and she gets cuffed by a cop all over again, shackled with hunky Obie to a lamppost. But Obie somehow manages to break free by ripping off Millie’s jeans, tearing them into strips to make up a rope — because denim is so easy to rip with your hands — and using it to climb up the lamppost and get himself free and then come back with his tools to rescue her (again). This weird larky scene is the single silliest and most improbable part in the film.

Meanwhile, Millie’s teen kids are involved in a tragic stabbing that has to do with sexual anxiety and sexual jealousy. It’s a strange narrative counter-current, left hanging at the end of this relatively short feature, which fails to absorb its emotional implications or how this microcosm of violence and dismay fits into the sketchily imagined bigger picture.

There are some powerful moments in Kings, certainly. The convenience store shooting of Latasha Harlins — just days after the King beating, and without any prison sentence for its perpetrator — is shockingly portrayed, and Ergüven shows the flashes of random hysteria and chaos that a riot creates. But it’s a misstep for this talented director.

  • Kings is screening at the Toronto film festival and a release date is yet to be announced

Contributor

Peter Bradshaw

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Daniel Craig and Halle Berry to team up on LA riots drama
Craig will play a South Central recluse who helps Berry’s working-class mother in one of two films in development about the 1992 civil unrest

Henry Barnes and agencies

29, Jun, 2016 @11:15 AM

Article image
Darkest Hour review – Gary Oldman is a tremendous Winston Churchill in high-octane drama
An Oscar-buzzed performance acts as the stoic centre of Joe Wright’s retelling of the events of 1940, played as a House of Cards style thriller

Peter Bradshaw

14, Sep, 2017 @2:19 AM

Article image
Stronger review – Jake Gyllenhaal is Oscar-worthy in moving Boston marathon drama
The true story of Jeff Bauman, who lost both of his legs in the 2013 bombing, is told with detail and care in a film that works hard at avoiding cliche

Benjamin Lee

09, Sep, 2017 @12:30 AM

Article image
True Mothers review – Naomi Kawase's heartfelt yet frustrating drama
The director of The Mourning Forest returns with another sensitive film, this time about a difficult adoption, yet plot holes prove distracting

Peter Bradshaw

13, Apr, 2021 @10:17 AM

Article image
Submergence review – James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander drown in soggy romance
Wim Wenders’s globe-trotting tale of two lovers separated by circumstance is handsomely told but stilted dialogue and genre confusion weigh it down

Benjamin Lee

11, Sep, 2017 @10:14 PM

Article image
Battle of the Sexes review – Emma Stone serves up rousing, timely tennis drama
The Oscar winner makes for a convincing Billie Jean King opposite Steve Carell’s larger than life Bobby Riggs in a mostly entertaining film about gender inequality on the court

Benjamin Lee

11, Sep, 2017 @2:03 PM

Article image
Roman J Israel, Esq review – Denzel Washington captivates in unusual legal drama
A nervy, compelling performance from the Oscar-winning actor dominates this unconventional morality play from the writer/director of Nightcrawler

Benjamin Lee

12, Sep, 2017 @1:57 PM

Article image
Another Round review – Mads Mikkelsen anchors boozy tragicomedy
A reunion between director Thomas Vinterberg and his star of the 2012 drama The Hunt is a flippant and very, very drunken story of an unusual experiment

Peter Bradshaw

30, Jun, 2021 @3:28 PM

Article image
Ordinary Love review – Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville in potent weepie
Strong, sensitive performances assist a melancholic drama about a couple dealing with the fallout from a cancer diagnosis

Peter Bradshaw in Toronto

13, Sep, 2019 @7:25 PM

Article image
The Mad Woman’s Ball review – Mélanie Laurent’s compelling melodrama
The actor turns director again for a compelling psychodrama about women subjected to experimental psychiatric treatment

Peter Bradshaw

13, Sep, 2021 @3:00 AM