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

“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.)