“King Louis XIV’s quest for immortality leads him to capture and steal a mermaid’s life force, a move that is further complicated by his illegitimate daughter’s discovery of the creature.”
– Anonymous, IMDB
This film was an impulse buy for me purely because of Pierce Brosnan’s involvement. I have some nostalgia for the James Bond movies, my Dad having been a fan of the series meant I watched a fair share of the movies growing up (Though funny enough, Pierce was my Dad’s least favourite Bond… yes even including George Lazenby who only portrayed the character in one film). So sight unseen, I decided to snatch this movie up and give it the ol’ looksee for this blog.
I watched this movie for the first time with a few friends, and for the first 30 or so minutes everyone was pretty onboard with the plot. One friend in particular felt very confident that this was going to turn out to be a really good movie… but then as the film went on, that attitude changed. The film manages to simultaneously get less interesting, and yet more confusing the longer it goes on. And a lot of the interesting plot threads that we thought were being set up in those first 30 minutes don’t end up amounting to anything. In hindsight, the reason why we liked this film is that were imagining much better resolutions to those aforementioned plot threads.
For example the titular character, Marie-Josèphe, is introduced to as as a rebellious young woman who can’t help but go frolicking in the ocean against the orders of the nunnery where she lives. She’s very drawn to the ocean, and is later psychically drawn to the mermaid that gets brought to the palace. So we all thought that it’d get revealed that Marie-Josèphe would turn out to be half mermaid, as a way to explain her affinity to the ocean and her connection to the mermaid. But nope, we were completely wrong. I guess there’s nothing wrong with her just having this unexplained connection to the ocean… it’s just that in a movie, you kinda expect there to be a reason behind every action, so to have no explanation felt very unsatisfying.
Personally, I feel like this film also suffers from the issue of characters needing to act a certain way to move the plot forward. King Louis (Played by Pierce Brosnan) is the biggest example of this. Louis is both a charming guy and an extreme jerk, but the film doesn’t make you feel like those two opposing sides are part of the same coin. Instead it just feels like Louis’ personality flip-flops depending on whether the scene needs characters to like or hate him. It makes it very hard to know how to feel about him as a character… should we the audience see him as flawed, but likeable? Or is he meant to be a big jerk who masks said jerkish-ness behind an affable front?
This movie is based on a book, and I can’t help but assume that the book probably has a much better story. Though at the very least, watching the movie does generate a lot of discussion on what they could’ve (Or should’ve) done. The film, at least for my friend group, didn’t feel like it had enough “laugh-out-loud” goofy moments to turn this one into a “So-bad-it’s-good” film. I think this movie is one I recommend more for the types of viewers who enjoy dissecting a film and figuring out where it went wrong, and how it could be improved.
Bad Princess Movies 
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