Movie Thoughts: The King of Kings (2025)

• Released: April 10th, 2025
• Directed by: Seong-ho Jang
• Running time: 1h 43min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

William Shakespeare tells his son Walter the tale of the Gospel.

My Thoughts

Had mixed thoughts on this one going in, but overall I liked it. It does have some obnoxious aspects about it that knock it down a bit, but it also has quite a bit of good.

I'll get the negatives out of the way first: I don't like the framing device. I guess that this is what they wanted to draw in the younger audience rather than starting the story straightforward with Jesus' birth, but honestly I could've done without it, or it should've been reworked. Because the framing device of Shakespeare telling his son the Bible stories takes up too much time, and it massively distracts from the main core of the movie: Jesus' story. The lead-up before the Bible story begins is too long, and when we're finally in the Gospel section of the movie it keeps cutting back to Walter and Shakespeare a lot and it's rather annoying.

I also think that the character designs and animation are only so-and-so. Not the worst I've ever seen, but they don't look very good and honestly quite dated already. 

Finally, I'm not too fond of the rushed last arc leading to Jesus' resurrection feeling almost like an afterthought. We don't even see them discover the stone rolled away from the tomb and finding it empty. It literally just skips to Jesus already being risen again without much fanfare. When this is of course a very important part of the Gospel I don't think should be glossed over like this. 

That said, there are some positives. I liked the soundtrack. Despite the lackluster character designs/animation, the color palette of this movie can honestly be really beautiful and striking at times. And when the story is not being distracted with Walter and Shakespeare and instead just focusing on where it should (Jesus' story), it can be genuinely quite good. I liked seeing these various Bible stories come to life, I liked following Jesus throughout his story here. The voice acting was also pretty decent.

So yeah, not perfect, but I liked it more than I disliked it. I just wish there was less focus on the Shakespeare part of the story.