ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

PodBill Just what I expected

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Floris Kleijne The original Tonke Dragt children's book was one of my favorites as a child. Having recently read the book to my own children, I discovered that it hasn't quite stood the test of time: slow, sometimes contrived, with stilted dialogue and sexist tendencies to make Tolkien proud. How fortunate, then, that a movie was made; what an excellent opportunity to reinvent the story while still staying true to the source material, like Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings.No such luck.Brief voor de Koning as a film is rooted firmly in the Dutch tradition of shameless mediocrity. The screenplay includes most crucial scenes from the book, but presents them in a bloodless, uninspired sequence, completely draining what little tension the original story carried. The acting is community theater level and worse, the entire cast delivering badly written lines with wooden expressions and clumsy body language. Direction, production, and even camera work and lighting were so bad I began to notice them.Dutch film critics and moviegoers alike have a tendency to embrace Dutch products and grant them an extra star (on a five-star scale) or two for effort and out of misplaced chauvinism. This is the only explanation I can think of for the 5.8 on IMDb. Even the four I gave this atrocity feels too high.My kids loved it, though.

Andres Salama Aimed squarely at a children and young teenage audience, this film from the Netherlands is a reasonable entry into the medieval fantasy genre. A lot of the negative reviews here come from people comparing it to the popular children's book upon which is based, but not having read the book I can say this worked on me on its own. Working with a relatively small budget, it tells the story of young Tiuri (Yannick Van de Velde), who is to become a knight. As a last task he must stay the night in a church chapel with three other pupils, without talking, leaving or listening to anybody. But at night a cry for help is heard from behind the door, and a dying stranger tells Tiuri he must bring a secret letter to the king of a foreign country…So the adventure begins. There are some nice outdoor mountain locations, not filmed in flat Netherlands obviously, but in Scotland, France and Germany.

zazboy As a very big fan of the book. Both books actually (Geheimen van het Wilde Woud is even better), I was disappointed. One of the reason I didn't like the movie very much is because it was made for children.You don't see any blood., it is too simple. The scenes are too short and the dialogs are not that appealing to me and convincing. Some of the characters are casted very well ( the Germans) but the dutch actors didn't do it for me. There isn't an interaction between the characters. They didn't pay attention to detail. And the movie was short.The movie and the scenes are way too short. Mainly because it is a movie for children. You know how much this ruined the movie for me? There should have been a more dark vibe around the movie. I missed that. And the fighting wasn't that good either. And the way the Red Knights are dressed and the way their shields were. It is not like in the books. And it can't be that hard to made? Almost all the reason I gave that disappointed me, were because it was a dutch movie and because it was a children's movie. That is what ruined it for me because I had high hopes.I know making a movie out of a book is hard, but it can be done and there are good examples like some of the guys here mentioned ( Crusade in Jeans).Too bad, hopefully the second part ( Geheimen van het Wilde Woud) will be better.

c-i-z-ler This movie is dreadful. I really can not understand why the director is being praised for what he created here.Every scene seems to be rushed, as if there wasn't enough film in the camera. Like when Piak throws Tiuri his sword. Piak doesn't throw it further than a few feet yet when the camera changes its angle, all of a sudden the sword flies another 8 feet. Is it such a bother to just throw that sword a few times more often?And then there are the actors, almost all of them the best Holland has to offer and a few of Germany's great. How come none of these fine actors seem to shine in their parts? Isn't it a big part of the directors work to ensure they do their best?Then there are parts of the book that are altered for no good reason. Why doesn't this film start with Tiuri in the chapel? That would have been a great introduction for the main character. A dim lit chapel, and then the knock on the door and the cry for help. It is easy to convey a bit a drama to that, but it doesn't happen. Vokia is also wounded, no idea why, he wasn't in the book. And it doesn't quite fit either.There are parts that I liked in this movie. The shots of the landscape through which Tiuri goes are pretty good. The actor that plays Jaro does a good job. And when Tiuri meets the lord of the toll I got an emotional response from this performance, even though it doesn't really make sense in light of the book.All in all, I just think it is too bad they didn't put some more effort into this. It could have been something if the makers would have just spend some more time in preparing dramatic effect, storyboard and a decent script.I sincerely hope they don't ruin another great book by Tonke Dragt.A disappointed fan.