This is a mockumentary set in a parallel world. The parallel world, I'm sorry to say, isn't all that well done : Belgium, for some strange reason, is ruled by another king than our current sovereign, but pretty much all of the other national and international issues remain the same. This creates an immediate credibility problem - the same credibility problem, for instance, that you would get if somebody would make a movie about a 2017 American president called Reginald Ace. And this Reginald Ace is a soft-spoken, tiny, dark, curly-haired man of forty or so, who is married to a former model, who is addicted to twitter, who dislikes Mrs. Merkel, who talks of building a wall and curbing immigration and giving up on the Paris Agreement and... Well, you get my drift.
For people willing to suspend their disbelief, "King of the Belgians" offers little payoff. The humor is too light-weight, too purposeless, too irrelevant and too abstract to register.
The number of missed opportunities is astronomical, given the fact that Belgium, for all its charms, is one of the strangest countries in Europe : throw an apple in any direction you care to think of, and you're sure to hit a compromise, a complication, a contradiction, an exaggeration and/or a mystery. Our monarchy too is not without certain comical (or potentially comical) aspects. In other words, the jokes, gags and plots practically write themselves. So why go out of your way to scrub away 70 or 80 percent of this Belgian context ?
Still, the movie is pleasantly humane and goodnatured. It also boasts a good cast and good performances. Most notably, there is an excellent lead performance by Van den Begin. His king Nicolas is a nice, finely nuanced creation : a basically decent man, much hemmed in and limited by politics and tradition, who suddenly finds himself in uncharted waters and discovers (much to his surprise) that he actually likes a bit of adventure and challenge.
For people willing to suspend their disbelief, "King of the Belgians" offers little payoff. The humor is too light-weight, too purposeless, too irrelevant and too abstract to register.
The number of missed opportunities is astronomical, given the fact that Belgium, for all its charms, is one of the strangest countries in Europe : throw an apple in any direction you care to think of, and you're sure to hit a compromise, a complication, a contradiction, an exaggeration and/or a mystery. Our monarchy too is not without certain comical (or potentially comical) aspects. In other words, the jokes, gags and plots practically write themselves. So why go out of your way to scrub away 70 or 80 percent of this Belgian context ?
Still, the movie is pleasantly humane and goodnatured. It also boasts a good cast and good performances. Most notably, there is an excellent lead performance by Van den Begin. His king Nicolas is a nice, finely nuanced creation : a basically decent man, much hemmed in and limited by politics and tradition, who suddenly finds himself in uncharted waters and discovers (much to his surprise) that he actually likes a bit of adventure and challenge.