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Red, White & Royal Blue Movie Review

Red, White & Royal Blue is a 2023 romantic comedy film directed by Matthew Lopez and starring Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine. It’s a fun, but trashy movie.

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“We’re gonna need some pizza“

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Alex Claremont-Diaz, the first son of the United States, and young Prince Henry fall in love. However, considering their high-profile public lives, they must keep their relationship a secret at all costs. When I first watched the trailer for this movie, I thought it looked like a ridiculous woke fantasy made for the intended audience of alt-left liberals and nobody else. Now watching the final product, it was exactly as I thought it would be, just with the added focus on extensive rom-com clichés throughout, and it is those clichés that made me dislike the movie, not the aforementioned aspect.

So, what you have here is a shameless pro-Democrat and pro-British royalty propaganda where Texas is swept by a blue wave and a female president is reelected while her son is dating a British prince. While there is a bit of criticism directed toward the monarchy when it comes to their traditional values, most often they are depicted as doing so much good for the world when in reality they are the ultimate social parasites.

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So yes, the movie checks all those SJW boxes as the words transgender, Latino community and queer are thrown around numerous times. However, my primary issue lies not in all the excessive wokeness but in the plot that is so full of clichés that the end result is a movie that critics only praised for having a gay couple as the leads, but in actuality it is yet another tiresome rom-com that goes through all the same tired motions that we’ve seen countless times before with no strong themes, dialogue or dynamic spark to elevate it above all that mediocrity.

Red, White & Royal Blue also deals with so many stereotypes. How the British and Americans are depicted was very stereotypical with no room for complexities or nuance. The charismatic American and the colder British guy falling in love sounds clichéd because it is. There is also some family drama that felt contrived and an assistant character that was, yes, funny but familiarly over-the-top in her delivery. Her scenes were the funniest of the bunch undeniably, but I’ve seen this character countless times before.

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Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez are fine as the leads and their characters are at least somewhat well developed, but the actors’ chemistry was lackluster and most of their scenes together were expected and predictable. The movie is wildly entertaining, I will give it that. If you accept its trashiness, you can have a lot of fun with it. I just wish that it was less predictable and that it featured more genuine gay romantic moments. But it looks and sounds good with a soundtrack that does feature some horrendous auto-tuning, but a couple of fun numbers as well.