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“Red, White & Royal Blue,” premiering tomorrow on Prime Video, is a faithful adaptation of the Casey McQuiston best seller.
The film follows Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the first female President of the United States (Uma Thurman donning a strange Texan accent) and his romance with Prince Henry of Wales. It jumps right into the action, foregoing set ups and providing us with our protagonists’ first exchange, as Alex attends the royal wedding of Henry’s older brother and first in line for the throne.
Alex and Henry (Nicholas Galitzine) have had a long standing rivalry from the moment they first met years ago, filled with miscommunations and rude moments. As the wedding elapses, Alex gets drunk and, in a dumb effort to one up Henry, the two take a tumble and knock down the wedding’s luxurious cake, an event that’s captured on cameras and sold to newspapers as ‘Cakegate.’
To resolve the rising tensions between England as the US as the President readies to run for a second term, Alex and Henry are forced to play nice, setting up a meeting in London in order to fool the public into thinking that the two are friends. It’s there when the two realize that they have a lot of things in common, and begin to navigate flirtatious text and email exchanges from opposite sides of the globe.
© Prime Video“Red, White & Royal Blue” doesn’t reinvent the rom-com wheel. In fact, it adheres to the traditional formula pretty closely, with the the end result being a film that could have been made today or years ago, packed with two charming protagonists, love confessions, plentiful kissing and various auxiliary characters rooting for them to succeed.
The most novel part of the film is the fact that its centered on a gay romance and that it pushes for a relationship that’s organic and sexy, an impulse that a lot of queer films stifle in order to be deemed palatable to straight audiences. Alex and Henry are treated as if they were any other straight couple. Like tried and true romances, love prevails and the world adapts so the two can live happily ever after. Isn’t that nice sometimes?
