Movie Muser

A Royal Night Out takes a small part of a true story and then spins it off into a fiction. The known truth is that on VE Day in 1945, the young British princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, left Buckingham Palace to mingle with the crowds outside who were rejoicing after years of War.

We know that happened, but I think it’s fair to say the rest of the movie was made up. Having gotten permission to go out incognito, Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and Margaret (Bel Powley) discover their mother (Emily Watson) isn’t going to allow them to have the night of dancing and being normal that they’d hoped. Despite their mother’s desire to keep things dull and stuffy, the princesses give their military chaperones the slip and end up getting separated.

Margaret ends up on an adventure where she unwittingly ends up in a brothel, mixing with some rather unexpected characters. Elizabeth meanwhile is looking for her sister and ends up getting the reluctant help of RAF airman, Jack (Jack Reynor), who doesn’t realise he’s stumbled upon a princess (yes, there are shades of Roman Holiday here). Elizabeth entreats his aid, and together they set out across London, and rather unexpectedly they discover a connection, with the princess finding out for the first time in her life what it is to be normal, while Jack has his ideas about his place in the world challenged.

For about the first hour I couldn’t quite see what the point of A Royal Night Out was. Now I’m not saying movies need a point, but here the film simply ambles along in an amiable and very light fashion, where it barely needed to make its main characters princesses. It’s the fluffiest of confections, that initially seems almost at pains not to be anything except a bit of light farce. It’s nice, and mean that as both compliment and criticism.

I half wondered whether it was expecting all its viewers to be extremely elderly, and so didn’t want to do anything that might cause too much excitement and give then a funny turn.

There’s humour that will make you smile but not laugh, silliness that will amuse but not delight, and a plot that moves forward but doesn’t get that far. Thankfully, it does slowly reveal a little more, particularly with Elizabeth, who opens up as she discovers what it is to be treated as a normal person, without the strictures and expectations of royalty. It’s sweetly handled and occasionally rather affecting, and the chaste romance between Jack and ‘Lizzy’ works well.

Even so, it doesn’t add up to an awful lot and although an easy watch, it never rises above the level of being a mild diversion. It’s the sort of movie where it feels like it was very close to being extremely good, but everything from the script to the direction need a little more work and thought to get it there. There is some wit and charm, and I never disliked it, but if you asked me in a month to tell you about it, I’d have to think hard to remember all that much.

Overall Verdict: More an okay night on the sofa than A Royal Night Out, the film is diverting and has some really good moments – particularly when Elizabeth is weighing the possibilities of normality against a life of duty – but it doesn’t add up to a huge amount.

Special Features:
Making Of Featurette

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

While the title is enough to make any discerning person cringe and its unusual concept could have gone horribly wrong, Unfriended is actually quite an effective slice of teen horror – as long as you beef up your ability to suspend disbelief (or you already think teenagers are total morons).

The whole thing takes place in real time and for the entire movie you are watching the computer screen of a teenage girl called Blaire. It’s a year after her friend, Laura, killed herself, but Blaire, her boyfriend Mitch, and three of their friends are more interested in video chatting than mourning the loss.

However, it’s not going to be that easy for them, as there’s a mysterious, silent, sixth person on their video chat, and then Blaire starts getting messages sent to her from Laura’s Facebook account. At first she thinks it’s a sick joke, but then it starts to appear that something stranger and perhaps supernatural is going on, and that perhaps whatever is sending the messages wants the teens to suffer and die.

As with many films where the conceptual idea is all-encompassing (here a movie that shows you a computer screen for 80 minutes), Unfriended has to work hard to tell a story while staying just the right side of preposterous. Sometimes it skirts perilously close to the edge of utter nonsense – not the paranormal aspects, just how the characters react – but it’s still fairly effective.

What helps is that it grounds itself in real issues, as it appears genuinely interesting in teen bullying and how callous, thoughtless and self-serving young people can be, as well as the terrible repercussions that can come from that due to the power they have in their hands thanks to the likes of Youtube and Facebook. The more ridiculous aspects are then layered on that, but it ensures there’s a real darkness lurking underneath the teen horror and conceptual hijinks.

Unfriended manages to create tension, and despite the potentially gimmicky set-up it keeps the story moving forwards. Some have complained that the characters are all annoying and unpleasant, but that’s kind of the point – these are supposed to vacuous millennials who’ve been given far more power and information than any generation before them – thanks to modern technology – but who don’t have the knowledge or morality to use it responsibly.

That might be over-thinking it, and indeed if you want characters you’ll like, you’d better look elsewhere. However, I found the whole thing far more satisfying than I’d expected. There is an annoying tendency for the film to feel like it’s setting up a mythology for a potential franchise (a sequel is already planned), and admittedly underneath the concept and look at modern bullying, things are a tad predictable. But even so, it works.

Overall Verdict: There are a lot of daft and slightly clichéd aspects to Unfriended, but thanks to a real interest in modern bullying and a decent amount of tension, it’s not a bad teen horror flick.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac