Their solution: Teach them martial arts and turn them loose on a hundred or so equally nameless medieval dudes. Still, they deserve credit for cracking a premise that half the scribblers in Hollywood have been trying to figure out - namely, how to turn the industry’s most retrograde female stereotypes into 21st-century role models. When it comes time for characters to open their mouths, screenwriters Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton draw from a seemingly bottomless bag of clichés. Whatever Disney movies may have led you to believe about royals named Ariel (she sings!) and Belle (she reads!), this one learned Krav Maga behind her father’s back, and she can incapacitate a man twice her size with little more than a hairpin. Over the course of the next hour and a half, “The Princess” hardly stops to catch its breath. She begins the movie locked in the top floor of the castle, wearing a wedding dress and iron shackles, and ends it drenched in more blood than Stephen King’s Carrie, some of it hers, but most belonging to all the men who’ve underestimated her. Played by “The Kissing Booth” star Joey King as an anything-but-passive heroine, the movie’s anonymous eponymous protagonist isn’t a proper character so much as a one-dimensional empowerment symbol: “The Princess” represents the antithesis of every fairy-tale damsel who sat around waiting to be whisked away or married off. Practically everybody in “ The Princess” has a name, except the princess.
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