10-hour 'Kingdom' Bogged Down With Enchantment
By Robert Bianco
USA Today - 2/25/00
The Tenth Kingdom
NBC, begins Sunday, 9 p.m. ET/PT
* * 1/2 (out of four)
We may never see the likes of The Tenth Kingdom again.
NBC, in fact, doesn't seem convinced we should see it now. The
network has jiggered its schedule to push the last four hours of this 10-hour miniseries,
the longest on broadcast TV since 1989's War and Remembrance, out of the February sweeps
and has spread the word that it's a mess.
Well, in many ways it is: This latest project from Robert Halmi Sr.'
s overtaxed fantasy factory bogs down in the middle and collapses at the end. But it's an
ambitious, often enchanting mess, with more energy than a hundred more sensible TV movies
put together.
If only it didn't allow that energy to dissipate over too many
nights and far too many hours. Writer Simon Moore, who helped create the fantasy epic
genre with Gulliver's Travels, seems determined to share every Freudian fairy tale idea he
has ever had. It's like being read a bedtime story by an insomniac -- he keeps going, and
all you want to do is fall asleep.
Tenth is set up by a truly gorgeous credit sequence (if you watch
nothing else, watch that), which converts Manhattan into a magic kingdom. There we meet
Tony (John Larroquette) and his daughter, Virginia (Kimberly Williams), who leave New
York's ''tenth kingdom'' for the not-so-happily- ever-after world of the other nine.
They travel there -- not exactly willingly -- to help Prince Wendell
(Daniel LaPaine), who has been turned into a dog by his wicked stepmother, the Evil Queen
(Dianne Wiest). With the aid of a conflicted Wolf Man (Scott Cohen), they must evade the
grasp of the Queen's huntsman (Rutger Hauer) and three bumbling trolls (who look like
refugees from The Wiz) while finding the missing magic mirror that will send them home.
Well fine, but can't they get to it a little more quickly? After a
fairly promising start, the Kingdom loses its way in a long, slow slog that takes up most
of the middle.
The more our heroes get sidetracked by silliness, from shoe sniffing
to sheep songs to crooning mushrooms, the more our attention wanders. Worse yet, as they
roam the kingdom unhindered, the Queen begins to seem powerless. Instead of Star Wars or
Lord of the Rings, too often Kingdom plays more like Snow White and the Three Stooges.
For most of the miniseries, Wiest is a delight, neatly laying a sly
sense of humor over an evil core. But when the role goes squishy all around her and the
story implodes into family psychodrama, there's nothing even she can do to save it.
Larroquette's deadpan humor works well for him, and Williams is a
suitably spunky heroine -- at least until she's forced to play every scene in tears. Even
then she fares better than Cohen, who has been encouraged to play the role so broadly, he
eliminates the element of danger that is essential to both the comedy and the drama.
For all its faults, there is something noble about The Tenth
Kingdom. If it's folly, at least it's folly on a grand scale --though not grand enough to
warrant the threat of a sequel that arrives at the very end.
Talk about your fantasies.
Copyright 2000, USA Today, a division of Gannett Co., Inc.