Review of terrible Netflix princess movie The Royal Treatment

 

I love a Hallmark Christmas movie and the spinoff Netflix romances as much as anyone.  And I fully understand that part of their charm is that they are terrible.  

But sometimes one of these movies comes along that is terrible because it is charmless.  Take, for example, Netflix movie The Royal Treatment.   It stars Laura Marano, best known for her role in the perfectly okay  Disney show Austin & Ally, and Mena Massoud, who I have never heard of but also has a Disney background and is very cute. 

The biggest problem with the movie is not the standard plot -- commoner with a heart of gold falls in love with doltish but very hot prince, and the prince's butler/tutor/mentor turns out to be awesome -- but Marano's very, very distracting accent.  Her character, Izzy, is Italian-American and lives somewhere in New York City.  The Bronx, maybe?  I guess her accent is supposed to reflect that, but it's a weird mishmash of fake Boston accent, fake New York accent, and fake do-gooder princess accent.  There was not a single time that Marano spoke that I I was not pulled out of the movie by the way she was saying her words.  

Other than Marano's accent, the movie was just standardly offensive.  Happy dancing poor people!  Schools for low-income kids saved by hand-me-downs from rich people!  A hair salon that constantly catches on fire due to dangerous wiring but the health department doesn't care and the landlord doesn't have to do anything about it!  A person with no qualifications or experience offered a job leading a human services agency, because she is nice!  A European chef who is too incompetent to know how to cook spaghetti!  

I understand that the point of movies like this is not to be good.  But they could be.  What if Izzy, a business-owner responsible for the livelihood of several employees, actually understood the first thing about running a business?  What if one or two the people in the slum in the prince's kingdom of Lavania had an actual character trait?  I'm not talking about hard edges and -- heaven forfend -- lefty politics.  I'm just talking about a plot that is . . . a little more plot-like.