“The King of Kings” opts for a different approach. Directed by Jang Seong-ho, best known for his pioneering visual effects work in Korean cinema, and distributed by the rising Christian movie superstar Angel Studios, the movie paints Jesus as a man who called everyone around him to test the “power of faith” — faith in God, presumably, though that remains largely unspecified. At times I found myself thinking of the more generic faith that practitioners of positive thinking and manifestation call us to. You can really read whatever you want into it, even though the movie makes clear that faith in God’s power is what it probably means.
The tale begins with Ebenezer Scrooge staggering toward his own tombstone, which turns out to be in the mind of Charles Dickens (voiced by Kenneth Branagh) as he’s in the middle of delivering a dramatic reading of “A Christmas Carol” to a rapt audience. (I cannot decide if this device is merely a safeguard for audience members who don’t know who Dickens is without the Scrooge trigger, or has some larger significance.)
A cat interrupts Dickens’s performance, to his consternation. It’s the devious family cat (modeled very much on the contemporary block-headed cats of the “Pets” franchise), who’s wreaking havoc backstage where Dickens’s wife, Catherine (Uma Thurman), and three adorable unruly children are waiting for him to finish up. One of those children, Walter (Roman Griffin Davis), is obsessed with King Arthur, and when Dickens arrives home that night, Catherine announces that Walter is hanging out in his study, waiting for his father to tell him the story of the king of all kings, who’s way cooler than Arthur even though he never slew a dragon.
You guessed it! That’s Jesus. Hence the retelling begins, voiced by an impressive array of Hollywood talent: Oscar Isaac voices the Christ himself, but there’s also the apostle Peter (Forest Whitaker), Pontius Pilate (Pierce Brosnan), King Herod (Mark Hamill) and High Priest Caiaphas (Ben Kingsley). It’s baffled me for a long time why animated films pony up to nab name-brand voice talent — surely kids don’t need Chris Pratt’s credit to convince them to see “The Lego Movie” or “Garfield” or “Onward” — but in this case it makes box office sense. These names lend a certain credibility to the project, the feeling that this isn’t just a random Christian movie but something legit, with major talent behind it, the kind of movie that might lure even the not-so-faithful into the theater around the Easter season.
Cards on the table: As a Christian myself, I feel some natural ceiling to how frustrated I can possibly get at a movie that, after all, does a reverent and workmanlike job telling the story at the center of my own faith tradition. (It gets the timing of the Magi arriving from the east at that manger in Bethlehem wrong, but it’s hardly the first retelling of the story to do so.)
