Kings (2017)
In the spring of 1992, the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney King set off five days of uprising across the city that left more than fifty people dead and caused over a billion dollars in damage. It remains one of the most documented and debated episodes in modern American history, the kind of event that film has returned to repeatedly, from documentary work shot on the ground in real time to dramatic reconstructions made decades later. Kings, released in 2017, approaches this history from a street-level, domestic angle: a foster mother in South Central holding her patchwork household together as the neighbourhood around her comes apart. The tagline, "don't let your family get caught in the crossfire", says the quiet part out loud. This is a film less interested in the political mechanics of the uprising than in the human cost of living inside it.
The film is a Franco-Belgian co-production assembled by CG Cinéma and a cluster of international partners including Maven Screen Media and SCOPE Pictures, and it comes from writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, whose debut feature Mustang (2015) announced her as a filmmaker of real force. That first film, set in rural Turkey and following five sisters whose freedoms are systematically curtailed by their family, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and won the César for Best First Film, among a string of other festival prizes. The move from that intimate, controlled drama to a large-scale American period film is a significant step, both geographically and in terms of production ambition. Ergüven wrote Kings herself, and the material is clearly personal in its urgency, even if the landscape is not one she grew up in.
Halle Berry takes the central role of the foster mother, a performance built on physical and emotional endurance, while Daniel Craig appears as her neighbour, an odd fit that the film asks you to simply accept. Lamar Johnson, Kaalan Rashad Walker and Rachel Hilson are among the younger cast members filling out the household, and the film leans on them to carry much of the emotional weight when the drama closes in around the family unit. For a sense of where Craig has been at his more comfortable in recent years, I also reviewed Casino Royale and, at the other end of his Bond tenure, Spectre, both of which show an actor who works best when a role is built around him rather than awkwardly grafted onto an existing world.
Cinematographer David Chizallet shoots South Central in a palette that feels saturated and pressurised, the colours of a neighbourhood on a hot afternoon before the temperature breaks. When the streets erupt, the camera gets close and handheld, the frame crowding with bodies and smoke and orange light. The score, composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, brings their characteristic mix of mournful strings and low, humming unease, a sound that has served films like The Proposition and Hell or High Water well in similarly charged American settings. Here, their music gives the chaos a kind of elegiac undertow, the sense of grief beneath the anger. Editor Mathilde Van de Moortel has the unenviable task of shaping a film that moves between domestic comedy, romantic tension and civil conflagration, rhythms that do not naturally sit together, and the cutting reflects that difficulty. The film is 92 minutes long but contains enough tonal gear-changes to feel considerably longer.
The strangest thing about Kings is Daniel Craig. Not the performance in itself, which is perfectly fine, but the sheer oddness of the casting: a random Englishman parked in the middle of South Central Los Angeles as the city burns, and I could not stop noticing how out of place he looked. Every time he turned up, I found myself wondering what he was doing in this film at all.
That distraction would matter less if the film around him had more to offer. Kings dramatises the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, the days of rage that followed the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, seen from the ground level of a South Central foster mother, played by Halle Berry, fighting to keep a houseful of kids safe as the streets ignite. It is powerful, painful history, but it is also very well-trodden ground, and this telling does not add much we have not seen before, often seen done better.
What stung, for me, is who made it. Kings comes from Deniz Gamze Ergüven, whose debut Mustang I think is close to extraordinary, one of the best films I have watched in a long time, so I came to this desperate to love it. The gulf is disheartening. Everything Mustang had, the control, the ache, the sense of a director in complete command of her tone, is exactly what Kings lacks. It lurches where the earlier film flowed, and the fire in the streets never quite catches as fire in the story.
None of which makes it a bad film. Berry is committed, the recreation of the chaos has moments of raw force, and there is clearly a good film's worth of ambition in it. It simply never pulls together into anything you would call good, either. Two and a half stars, a well-meaning misfire from a director I know can do far, far better.
Kings sits in an uncomfortable middle ground: a film with serious intentions, capable craft and a subject that genuinely matters, which never quite finds the coherence to do justice to any of them. The 1992 uprising deserves unflinching, focused drama, and there are films that have given it that. This one, for all its ambition, is polished but unremarkable where it needed to be raw and sure of itself. For a companion piece about British cinema grappling with contested legal history and the human lives caught inside it, see also Let Him Have It. Ergüven remains a filmmaker worth following closely. Kings, though, is the kind of second feature that makes you grateful the first one exists.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-09-14
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Kings (2017) on YouTube
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