What About the Foundation?

There are some early reviews in and I seem to be an outlier on this one. I didn’t love it. It was OK. It had some cute quips and overall was inoffensive but a lot of things  didn’t make a ton of sense. Which to be fair, a lot of things in a lot of Hallmarks, especially royal Hallmarks, don’t. But this one seemed to try to be conveying some worthy if hackneyed message about girls’ empowerment, while subverting that message with many of the goings on in the movie. I can’t say that it was taking itself too seriously going by the over the top caricatures in the royal family and the butler/minder/official babysitter character always hovering either benignly or menacingly in these royal movies. And of course, we have the down to earth quirky best friend character as well. The latter characters actually turned out to be bright spots. The butler was played by Simon Kunz who fulfilled the same duties in this as he did so memorably as Martin in Lindsey Lohan’s remake of The Parent Trap. Rae Lin as the best friend seemed to be channeling Awkwafina in Crazy Rich Asians or Heather Matarazzo in The Princess Diaries and did a darn good job of it.   But overall, the message Princess Bea was sending to girls with her life’s work with the foundation was made to seem all talk but no walk.

It started with our first scene with Princess Beatrice. She is hiding under her covers with mascara streaming down her face on the Monday morning following a weekend crying and junk food-eating-ice-cream-out-of-the-carton binge. Because her boyfriend broke up with her via text message. I was really curious about this because Beatrice, who no one knows is a princess yet, is played by absolutely gorgeous Mallory Janson and whose character, we learn later,  seems like a very intelligent and nice lady with a nice personality. I mean what kind of a jerk was this guy? And what were his good qualities that would so reduce this 33-year-old woman to a puddle of misery over being dumped by the likes of him? Alas we will never know. He is never mentioned again. There are more important games afoot. Bea is the founder and head of a foundation for underserved girls interested in education and careers related to STEM. She gets cleaned up from her pitiful pity-fest to win a grant for her already successful organization from another organization. On the way back home she is stalked then cornered in a dark alley by two black SUVs with men in black popping out to take her and her loyal buddy to a hotel to meet Prince Desmond so he can propose marriage. Way to pave the way, Dude. A real charm offensive. Not surprisingly, after an argumentative first meeting she turns him down. See, her older sister, who was heir to throne, broke her public engagement to Desmond to elope with a commoner. And a plumber, to boot! Since the marriage was meant to mend a 3oo-year-old rift between Bea’s country and Desmond’s country, the only solution to a rapprochement between the two is for Desmond to marry Bea instead, who is now heir to her countries throne.  After turning him down, she changes her mind when she finds out he is a pretty good guy after all under his stiff buttoned-up princeliness. She gets him to sneak out of the hotel for pizza and bowling and he confides that he and Polo ponies don’t get along. That seals the deal and now its off to country-ends-in-rovia and it’s neighboring country-ends-in-ierrie for the engaged couple to meet the parents and the public and to attend a summit. I’ll stop there with the recap, but for a movie that touts female empowerment, there are too many scenes of her getting patronized and scolded by underlings, and being forced into an unneeded makeover and other style over substance situations. With her making nary a peep of protest or foot-putting down. They also make her wear ugly and unflattering nearly identical gowns that all look like cinched in kaftans. She rebels only once to go to the palace gate to receive a flower from a peasant child instead of being hustled into the palace by bodyguards. #ThePrincessofthePeople! There are a lot of amusing hashtags in this but I only caught a few as they go by so fast you couldn’t read them. The good thing is that all of the publicity has been really good for her foundation.  But is it the right message to send “their girls” that their mentor has been dragooned into a political marriage and taken away from the good work of  running her foundation? And they are getting the grant not on their merits but because of her now famous Princess status?

**spoilers**

At the end, Bea finally comes into her own empowerment-wise by calling a halt to the silliness and resolving the conflict between the two kings and brokering an agreement to unify the two kingdoms. This makes Desmond’s and Bea’s marriage unnecessary after all and they publicly call it off. But now they really love each other. This leads to a really dumb reconciliation scene. Desmond is driving away in a motorcade and miles and miles away, (across the border, in fact) from Bea and her palace when he changes his mind. Little does he know that Bea is chasing after him in a Vespa but they run out of gas. She starts to run down the road to catch the motorcade still speeding away as far as she knows. Lolwut? Hilarious. I guess she left her cell phone at home. Desmond, also cell phone-less, I guess, gets out of the car and starts running back to Bea in his dress shoes. As far as he knows, she is still at the palace. What was he thinking? Couldn’t he have just commandeered one of the limos and driven himself back? He wasn’t exactly just at the end of the driveway. Oh well. He may not have any common sense, but he does have a flare for the dramatic.  Luckily he catches a ride with a farmer, saving the day. They meet at the border where there is another marriage proposal and a reply in the affirmative. There are a couple of cute scenes at the end, circling back to a couple they met at the bowling alley and introducing the two royal movies that are to follow this one later in the month. Fingers crossed that those make more sense. No word on who is going to run her so important and beloved foundation she has dedicated her life to going forward.