‘The King of Kings' Review: A Remaking of the Christ

New York Times

10-04-2025

'The King of Kings' is an animated film about the life of Jesus as narrated by Charles Dickens to his child and cat, which is not quite as Mad Libs-adjacent as it sounds. Dickens did, in fact, write a little book called 'The Life of Our Lord,' a retelling of the very familiar story that he read aloud to his children every year. It wasn't published until 1934, after the last of Dickens's children had died, on its author's orders.
You can read it if you like — it's freely available on the Internet Archive — and see that Dickens is, more or less, faithful to the Bible, albeit emphasizing Jesus as great moral teacher in language appropriate for English children in the mid-19th century. 'I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ,' it begins. 'For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable, as He was.'
Dickens's book feels very Victorian, in that its Jesus is mostly just a really good guy, and it ends with a little sermon about what Christianity is really about: 'to do good, always even to those who do evil to us,' to 'be gentle, merciful and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our hearts, and never make a boast of them,' and so on. Basically, to be Christian is to try to be kind and decent to all and thus hope that God will save us.
'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.)
But also, as a Christian — and as a movie critic — I would like to say this loudly, with my whole chest: This movie doesn't need to exist. I have grown weary of people telling me they think Hollywood has 'run out of ideas' in an age of reboots and remakes — a sentiment I agree with, by the way — when movies like this one are made, often with the aim of pleasing those exact complainers. Charles Dickens provides nobody's idea of a new perspective on Jesus's life. Nothing happens that hasn't happened before. This isn't 'The Chosen,' the hit show that was also distributed by Angel Studios in its early seasons, with its fresh perspective on the many characters in the story. It's just the same story: every beat expected, every moment predetermined.
There are dozens of films about the life of Jesus, a narrative filmmakers set about retelling almost as soon as the film camera was invented. They all still exist. (Oscar Isaac is even in another one.) You can still rent any of them. Heck, a theater can even show them, and sell tickets to it, and probably make a tidy profit doing so.
My frustration stems with my feeling, merited or otherwise, that this movie is a grab for potential patrons' pockets. It feels calibrated purely to capitalize on an audience who senses a moral obligation to purchase tickets for every single retelling of Jesus's life. This impression was not dissuaded by the film's post-resurrection exhortation, featuring a reel of cute little children saying how much they liked the movie and asking you to take out your phone and scan the QR code to buy a ticket for someone else to see the film.
All I can say is this: When the third or fourth child asked me to pull out my phone and buy a ticket, I found myself thinking of a scene from earlier in the movie, one familiar to Bible readers. In it, Jesus shows up to the temple in Jerusalem and discovers many vendors bilking the faithful out of their money. Irate, he overturns tables, declaring that these vendors have made his father's house — that is, the house of God — into a den of thieves.
I don't think there's thievery going on here, to be perfectly clear. These movies profit because people give up their cash willingly. But I wish fervently that those who want to tell Bible stories for the faithful would avail themselves of the many other options: the parables, the prophets, the revelations. The many stories that go untold, for reasons I can only imagine.