The King of Kings (2025): Review

It's the busiest season of Bible films that I can remember and with The Chosen's latest cinematic instalment hitting number 2 in the US box office on its opening night, it's perhaps not surprising that other retellings of the Jesus story are also hoping to find an audience in the run up to Easter.

One such offering is The King of Kings, a 3D-animated film distributed by Angel Studios, the team formerly associated with earlier seasons of The Chosen. Officially it doesn't open in the UK until Friday (11th), but due, I imagine, to differing Easter holiday dates over here, many places are screening it from Monday, and on a similar number of screens to its better-known competitor.

While Angel are distributing it, it's been produced by Mofac studios and the creative team behind the film is South Korean, led by writer-director Seong-ho Jang. Up to now, he's been best known as a visual effects expert having established himself working with Park Chan-wook on Boksuneun naui geot (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 2002). Given the current strength of Korean cinema in general at the moment, and the fact that over 30% of South Korea identify as Christian, in some senses it's only a surprise that this appears to be the first major Korean adaptation of the Gospels.

But that's if it can be considered an adaptation of the Gospels, because in many ways the film is an adaptation of a book by Charles Dickens "The Life of Our Lord" a work written in the late 1840s, but not published until 1934 upon the death of his last surviving child. To strengthen the association with the book, the opening scenes actually begin in 1840s London with Dickens on stage while trying to handle his feisty son Walter (voiced by Roman Griffin Davis). There will be a certain irony, happening up and down the country as parents in the flip-seats wrestle with their similarly-super-active children in an effort to get them to watch Dickens doing likewise.

Anyway, to placate his son, and finish the show before he entirely loses his audience, Dickens promises Walter to read him the story he's been writing about Jesus, but knowing Walter's predilection for King Arthur, he draws him in by telling him it's a story about the king of kings. And so that evening Walter,  Charles (Kenneth Branagh) his wife Catherine (Uma Thurman) sit down for its first reading and the action moves to first century Judea. Bethlehem first, to be precise. 

From then on, we occasionally flip back and forth to The Dickens family in a fashion which will be very familiar to anyone who's seen The Princess Bride, but most of the action centres on Jesus. There are however some interesting moments when the animation places Walter himself in the Jesus scenes, as a way of showing Walter's immersion in the story. It's a quirky way to do things, but I do like this in a way, not least because it reminds us of the gap between the story we have, and the events themselves. It's a way of breaking the fourth wall, I suppose.

What follows is a rapid fire trip through the main stories of the Gospels. It's been a quarter of a century since the last time an animated version of whole Jesus story made it to UK cinema screens,* but that film – The Miracle Maker – also opted for covering a lot of stories at a good pace. I plan to write a scene guide for The King of Kings so I can compare it to the Miracle Maker scene guide I created way back in 2006. 

Another interesting point of comparison, though, is with Dickens's book itself. I've only given "The Life of Our Lord" a quick look over, just to confirm that Seongho Jang's film broadly corresponds to the contours of the novel, but my friend Peter Chattaway told me in private correspondence that the specific content of the film's Jesus material diverges quite significantly from the book "you could almost argue that the film is a direct adaptation of the gospels that happens to use Dickens and his son as a storytelling device, without being *particularly* based on Dickens' book itself".

The stories that Branagh selects do form a fairly recognisable pattern. We get a nativity scene and naturally Jesus' escapades in the temple as a boy are included as it's the easiest story to relate to both for Walter (as a young boy) and the primary target audience in the cinema (or eventually streaming, I presume). There are a number of miracles – I counted nine prior to the resurrection – but only a bit of teaching before Jesus turns towards Jerusalem and is executed. 

There's a certain irony that Jesus is regularly called "Great Teacher" and yet so little of his teaching features. That's not really a criticism as this is a film squarely aimed at children. That puts a squeeze on running time and is hardly the right context for a pressing examination of Jesus' ethics. That said a few parables and the occasional famous saying might have fitted nicely. Given that, it's therefore interesting to see Jesus' message played out instead in the quotes from Dickens' A Christmas Carol as the end credits roll.

Nevertheless, this does point towards the film's presentation of Jesus. One of the key components of this, is the idea that he is exciting. This not only comes across in the way Dickens entices his son into the story in the first place, but also in how he describes Jesus. At one point he tells Walter that the King Arthur stores he adores are "based on this story". This is also reflected in the way the films opts for the more spectacular miracles. Just in terms of the medium of film, calming the sea, raising the dead etc., of course, make for good cinema, but they also make Jesus exciting in a way that perhaps the filmmakers are hoping will cut across prevailing ideas.

That leads on to the second element of the film's message: the importance of these miracles and their link to faith. At one point Dickens even summarises the purpose of Jesus' signs saying "they were miracles to  prove the power of faith". Following the feeding of the 5000 we hear "I think you're here because I fed you and you want more". 

There's a third aspect here as well, because occasionally the film parallels Jesus with Dickens himself, such as a rather protracted scene where Walter loses his cat. There are a few times where the camera cuts from Dickens to Jesus with the two men in identical poses (or vice versa), perhaps as if to convey the similarities between Jesus and a good parent. Perhaps it veers a little too far towards "My dad's a bit like Jesus", but that's a bit of a nitpick.

One thing I did find troubling, though, was the way the film portrayed Jewish involvement in Jesus' death. Someday, I will write up a detailed argument about this (beyond that which I wrote in my book), but essentially it would have been so clear to the Gospels' original audiences that Rome was the utterly dominant power that they didn't feel the need to really emphasise that: Jesus was executed by Rome on a Roman cross. Certain Jewish people are blamed in the Gospels for having some involvement with Jesus' arrest, but an overemphasis on this in the intervening years led to growing anti-Jewish sentiment and then into repeated violence by Christians against Jewish people. So how these events are treated really matters.

Unfortunately, the film leans far more into the idea that Jesus' fellow Jews were responsible for his death than the idea that the Romans were. The Romans are barely involved or shown until Jesus is dragged before Pontius Pilate, who is reluctant to allow Jesus to be killed, but gives in to the huge mob that has assembled in his courtyard.

In contrast, Jewish leaders frequently meet in darkened rooms to subversively plot against Jesus. Not only are they costumed far more religiously than Jesus and his disciples (we have little evidence as to what a Pharisees every day clothing was, but there's little reason to think it was much different from Jesus' clothing) but also some of the leading characters such as Caiaphas, for example, are caricatured in a fashion that draws on negative historic stereotypes of Jews ('hooked' noses for example). Of course, the story is being told by Dickens, whose own portrayal of Jewish characters was itself stereotyped and troubling at times, but I don't get the impression that this level of depth is what the filmmakers are exploring here. Perhaps, given the film's South Korean origins, these aspects of telling the story of Jesus' death are just not on the radar as much as they ought to be, and of course most western filmmakers fall foul of these issues too.

The appearance of the Jewish characters is not helped by the filmmakers adopting an extremely caricatured style of animation. It's obviously an artistic decision not to use life-like representations of the characters, but to go for a bolder more evocative style, and films such as Up (2009), Song of the Sea (2014) and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) have all been successful, both commercially and creatively, by doing so. To some degree this is about personal taste and the overall style of animation that was used here didn't really appeal to me, but if you've seen the trailer you will know what to expect and you can make your decision on that accordingly.

That said, at times the animation is impressive. Perhaps as you might expect from a visual effects expert like Seong-ho Jang, some of the film's more spectacular moments are given a real boost by being able to draw on computer animation in this fashion. The scene where Jesus walks on water, and at the moment of Jesus' death are both able to 'move the camera' in a way that would be virtually impossible without CGI. Similarly the scene depicting Jesus' temptation is enabled to flow far more naturally than I can recall in any treatments of these passages by the way the scenery moves and morphs in the background.

There are also a few moments where 2D animation is put to excellent use. As part of Dickens setting the scene for Walter, he tells him about Moses and the Red Sea and the switch to a totally different style  of animation here really works and looks fantastic. Later, as Jesus wrestles with his emotions in the Garden of Gethsemane, there's another flashback to another Garden, Eden, and Seong-ho Jang opts again for a two-dimensional style, perfectly recreating Gustave Doré's "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" (1866). As an aside there's another reference to another biblical portrayal which I enjoyed. When Jesus heals someone's sight we see his face as their vision returns to them, through their eyes, as with the earlier silent film that shares its title with this film, Ceci B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927).†

One other interesting element of the film's use of the camera is the number of shots taken from a low angle. This, obviously, emphasises that these stories are being seen from the angle of a child. This does give these moments quite a different feel. It's not uncommon for characters to look up a little bit at Jesus in Jesus films. It suggests awe, or perhaps respect and admiration, and quite a few Jesus films employ a God-shot at crucial moments, but these ultra low angles really do give a sense fo the story being told from a fresh perspective.

As you might expect from a voice-cast that includes bona fide movie stars in their own right like Oscar Isaac (Jesus), Pierce Brosnan (Pontius Pilate), Mark Hamill (Herod), Ben Kingsley (Caiaphas) and Forest Whitaker (Peter) as well as experienced, proven, old-pro voice actors such as Jim Cummings and James Arnold Taylor in multiple roles, the vocal work is excellent in this film and it does a great job of compressing a large amount of material into a necessarily short running time. While the Dickensian book-ending device does eat into that running time, it makes up for it by allowing Branagh to explain the characters' motives at various points, without that feeling forced.

Overall I think how you react to the film will largely depend on how you (and any children who you'll be watching it with) feel about the style of its animation. That said, even as someone who didn't particularly appreciate that style, there were certainly a lot of interesting aspects to it and the way in which it introduces so many parts of the Gospels in such a short time is a strength. Moreover, the cast is excellent and there are some great visual effects to be enjoyed.

The King of Kings will be in UK and Irish cinemas from the 11th April – for more information and to book your tickets visit
www.thekingofkingsfilm.com

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*There was, of course Sony's The Star (2017), but this only told the Nativity stories.
†There were a couple of other connections with Jesus movies I spotted, though these were either less deliberate or at least more incidental. Firstly, at one point Dickens calls his tale "The greatest story about the greatest king ever" which felt like a reference to The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Maybe that's a bit of a stretch. Secondly, the headscarves worn by some of the Pharisees and Chief Priests (who are actually differentiated in this film) have a very similar design to those in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) although this is hardly the first subsequent Jesus film to reproduce them. Lastly, the low angled shot of the woman accused of adultery was reminiscent of similar low-angled shots of this scene in The Passion of the Christ (2004).