With the usual forced hipness of an Amazon Prime original movie... where everyone's on the same level of pop culture glibness... Red, White and Royal Blue plays it too safe with the inevitable romance between a female president's son (who grew up "working class" before his mom became the leader of the free world, somehow) and the classy, born-rich prince of England...
Being a rom-com, both are supposed to be polar opposites, and yet they're not different enough to comically clash before inevitably connecting: the prince is snobby and antisocial yet he's also cool and affable, while the President's son is socially confident yet is also geeky and vulnerable...
And while there's an attempt to make their initial anti-bonding work by a rudimentary viral moment involving a large cake... it's extremely contrived, seeming out of a sitcom rather than a genuine movie...
The two male leads should have been fleshed out separately and equally: we kind of know the American son yet don't really know the prince at all...
And since the surrounding side-characters are so progressively cautious and broadly modern-thinking (aka politically-correct), there's no edge to the couple's controversial union (which is the story's primary twist) to make any kind of decent comedy from it, romantic or otherwise.
Being a rom-com, both are supposed to be polar opposites, and yet they're not different enough to comically clash before inevitably connecting: the prince is snobby and antisocial yet he's also cool and affable, while the President's son is socially confident yet is also geeky and vulnerable...
And while there's an attempt to make their initial anti-bonding work by a rudimentary viral moment involving a large cake... it's extremely contrived, seeming out of a sitcom rather than a genuine movie...
The two male leads should have been fleshed out separately and equally: we kind of know the American son yet don't really know the prince at all...
And since the surrounding side-characters are so progressively cautious and broadly modern-thinking (aka politically-correct), there's no edge to the couple's controversial union (which is the story's primary twist) to make any kind of decent comedy from it, romantic or otherwise.