The Royal Treatment

Directed by Rick Jacobson, The Royal Treatment follows a sassy hairdresser (Laura Marano’s Izzy) as she finds herself falling for an engaged prince (Mena Massoud’s Thomas). It’s far-from-fresh material that is, predominantly speaking, employed to hopelessly underwhelming and thoroughly tedious effect by Jacobson, as the filmmaker, working from Holly Hester’s script, delivers a styleless, bottom-of-the-barrel endeavor that has, for the most part, been geared solely towards the most undiscriminating of tween viewers – with the often aggressively dumbed-down atmosphere paving the way for a midsection that’s as frustrating as it is interminable. The movie’s laundry-list of inept, incompetent elements is compounded by a seriously unappealing and downright grating lead performance by Marano, as the actress turns in a nails-on-a-chalkboard, pitched-to-the-rafters effort that essentially (and effectively) prevents the viewer from working up an ounce of interest in or sympathy for her character’s exploits. (And it doesn’t help, either, that the amateurish supporting cast uniformly fares almost as poorly.) The end result is an utterly disastrous romcom that fails on just about every level it attempts, which is too bad, really, given that the well-worn premise could’ve been employed to, at the very least, watchable effect.

* out of ****

Leave a comment