To Kill a King

I was counting on you. You let me down. To Kill a King is directed by Mike Barker and written by Jenny Mayhew. It stars Tim Roth, Dougray Scott, Olivia Williams, James Bolam and Rupert Everett. Music is by Richard G Mitchell and cinematography by Eigil Bryld. It’s the end of the English Civil War and with King Charles 1st (Everett) held prisoner by the Parliamentarians, Sir Thomas Fairfax (Scott) and Oliver Cromwell (Roth), friends and colleagues, fall out over the best plan of action for the New England. A severely troubled production and budgetary constraints left To Kill a King with a mountain to climb just to get acknowledged as a historical epic of worth. Add in the dubious take on this part of English history that so irked the historians, and you would be forgiven for thinking that the film is something of a stinker. Not so actually. For although it’s clearly far from flawless, it’s a literary piece of work that chooses character dynamics over blood and thunder. Suffice to say that those searching for a battle strewn epic should look elsewhere, but if you have a bent for observations on key personalities involved in war politics during times of upheaval in a period setting? Then this delivers the goods. Well performed by the principal players as well. 7/10

History suggests that Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) was actually quite a reluctant rebel against the rule of Charles I (Rupert Everett) but that once he had the bit between his teeth, he proved ruthless in the execution of his task to remove the King and assert the supremancy of Parliament as the voice of the people. With the King now imprisoned at Whitehall Palace, though, there is considerable uncertainty as to what to do with him. With victory attained, what is to be gained by murdering a God-annointed king? On the other hand, could keeping him alive merely serve to galavise the hopeful Royalists bent of restoration? Few prove prepared to stand upon to the newly aggrandised Lord Protector, but Sir Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott) is one. A long-term confidante of Cromwell, he is one of the few to speak his mind in the hope that he can reign in some of the excesses now being exhibited by a man who was rapidly becoming as despotic as the man they had struggled to defeat - only he couldn't claim any diving right of kings to justify his zealous and murderous puritanism. Meantime, we don't really get to understand much of what drove the deluded king to adhere to his increasingly fraught position, nor do we treally develop much the relationship between himself and Lady Fairfax (Olivia Williams) which alternates inconclusively between the political and the personal. The English civil war was a brutal affair yet we see virtually nothing of that here - budget constraints perhaps? - so much of the drama is left to two actors who don't really own the story and to a verbosity of dialogue that rather drags this admittedly good looking film into a doldrums of "Janet & John" history. Unlike "Cromwell" (1970) this attempts to tell us a story of two men who started off on the same side but whose approaches to victory drove a wedge between them, and it could have been a story worth telling - but this doesn't capture much of the prevailing fear or passion of the time and I'm afraid I was distinctly underwhelmed by the superficiality of the thing.