“Damsel” is very proud of the way it subverts our expectations of a fairy tale.
“There are many stories of chivalry, where the heroic knight saves the damsel in distress,” star Millie Bobby Brown declares in the opening narration of the fantasy film, hitting Netflix this week. “This is NOT one of them.”
That is true, for “Damsel” is a tale in which the princess must save herself.
It also is a movie that asks too much of Brown, the talented young actress we’ve watched grow up in Netflix’s popular science-fiction-meets-horror series “Stranger Things” and who’s delighted in two previous Netflix movies, 2020’s “Enola Holmes” and its likewise enjoyable 2022 sequel, “Enola Holmes 2.”
She has had a lot of on-screen help carrying the dramatic weight of those projects. In Damsel,” however, despite notable cast mates in Angela Bassett and Robin Wright, Brown is asked to haul almost all of it.
Perhaps she could, were the screenplay by Dan Mazeau (“Fast X”) much stronger and the direction of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (“28 Weeks Later)” better than acceptable.
With these key components at the levels they are, “Damsel” is a mildly entertaining time-passer, one likely to appeal to a younger demographic — an audience perhaps ready to graduate from basic princess tales to something a little darker and at least a little more interesting.
Brown’s Elodie is no princess when we meet her but instead a simple girl from a simple family living in a place where people are starving and freezing, she and her sister, Floria (Brooke Carter), gathering what they can for kindling. When a letter arrives from Queen Isabelle (Wright), proposing Elodie be wed to her son, Prince Henry (Nick Robinson, “Love, Simon”), Elodie’s father, Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone, who’s also on Netflix this week in the series “The Gentlemen”), and stepmother, Lady Bayford (Bassett), are excited about the promised bounty that will be given to them in exchange.
Although Elodie initially feels this is not reason enough to marry, she dutifully accepts her fate.
“The union will save us,” she allows. “I’ve made my peace with it — my happiness is a small price to pay for the future of my people.”
Upon the family’s arrival in the queen’s opulent realm, however, there are signs all is not what it seems. (Hint: That probably has something to do with the fire-breathing dragon we encounter in the film’s prologue.) While the viewer is beaten over the head with reasons to fear for Elodie, she mostly brushes off any concerns and marries the prince, who, to be fair, seems like an OK chap.
Without giving away further details, know that our heroine will come face to face with the dragon (voiced by the unmistakable Shohreh Aghdashloo) — who has reason to be furious with the royals — and must fight to survive the dragon’s hunt inside a cavernous maze. (That Elodie will find herself in such an environment is foreshadowed by the revelation she draws mazes as a hobby. Do Mazeau or Fresnadillo use Elodie’s gift for maze design in any kind of clever way as the adventure unfolds? No, not really. “Damsel” just isn’t that kind of movie.)
Elodie makes a couple of illuminating discoveries within the caverns, but it would help the film’s momentum if she encountered, say, a collection of communicative cave people — a few new characters to help carry things along. As it stands, it’s mainly a lot of Elodie, intermittently chatting with the vengeful dragon.
To say that “Damzel” moves in fits and starts may be too kind.
Brown, whose movie credits also include MonsterVerse entries “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019) and sequel “Godzilla vs. Kong” (2021) and is also counted among this movie’s executive producers, is not the problem here, giving a performance that crosses Ts and dots Is. She simply isn’t so good as to be the solution, either.
Again, no one else gets much screen time, but it is fun to see Wright as an evil queen given that many first knew her as Princess Buttercup in 1987’s “The Princess Bride.” She brings some of her fierce “House of Cards”/Claire Underwood energy to “Damsel,” but that doesn’t move the needle.
Considering some of its tasty ingredients, you wait for “Damsel” to find a way to lift itself out of its below-average realm, like a dragon rising to rain fire on the poor souls below. Alas, though, that spark never comes.
‘Damsel’
Where: Netflix.
When: March 8.
Rated: PG-13 for sequences of strong creature violence, action, and bloody images.
Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes.
Stars (of four): 2.