Distressed

I remember being pretty excited about Damsel (2024): sword-and-sorcery fantasy about a badass woman starring Millie Bobby Brown. What could go wrong?

Brown is princess of an impoverished kingdom. Her father is letting his subjects go with an armload of firewood, all that's left. But he gets an offer for Brown's hand from a rich kingdom, and he accepts, whether she likes it or not. 

When they arrive at the foreign kingdom, she actually likes it pretty well. The castle is lovely, the prince seems nice enough, the queen is kind of hostile, but mother-in-laws, what are you going to do? On the day of the wedding, they go into the hills for an ancient ritual in a cave. And at the end, the princess throws Brown into a pit. 

It was all a ruse, and she is being sacrificed to a dragon. 

She spends quite a bit of time doing a cave crawl, surviving, finding dead ends, seeing her father come to the rescue and get killed, etc. She is pretty resourceful, but hardly badass. I'm sure she gets better at all this later on in the movie, but I'll never know, because I gave up around here, maybe an hour in. 

This movie had decent production values, and a good cast: Ray Winstone was Brown's father, Angela Bassett her step-mother, the evil queen was Robin Wright, and the dragon was voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo. And I like this kind of fantasy movie. But it felt so slow. At least 20 minutes to get Brown into peril, and who knows how long to get her fighting back. The tagline is something like, "This damself doesn't need saving", but there is an actual rescue party that comes for her, and gets killed. For most of what I saw, she did need saving. 

Also, the idea of a princess that can save herself is not as groundbreaking as these guys seem to think. I think even Disney princesses have been saving themselves for a while now. 

I saw someone comment that Netflix is making Brown a star in the same way the old studio system did. That's great, I love her. But between this and the Enola Holmes movies, I'm not sure they are doing her many favors with the roles they are offering. Oh well, at least she's getting paid.