The troubled Nicole Kidman royal biopic “Grace of Monaco” was jeered with scathing reviews ahead of its world premiere 𒈔at the Cannes Film Festival Wednesday night.
“Is it ev✱en possible to make a boring film out this rich, juicy, gossipy material? It would seem so,” wrote a critic for the Hollywood Reporter. He called it “a stiff, stagey, thuddingly earnest affair which has generated fa🔴r more drama off screen than on.”
The Telegraph’s reviewer reported that international critics at a morning screening preceding the red-carpet premiere “even by the end of the first scene had started curling 🦂up, like startled armadillos, into tight little balls of embarrassment.”
“Not so much a turkey as a dodo, ‘Grace of Monaco’ nev🦹er takes flight and extinction is probably the best course for it,” writes the reviewer for the Times of London. “Poor Nicole Kidman does her best as actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly, but suffers from the shortcomings of a risible plot and dialogue lost in translation.”
Said Variety: “If Princess Grace✃ was the great role of Kelly’s career, the same can’t be said for Kidman, who would seem to be perfectly cast as the ca🐭refully vetted wife trapped in a loveless A-list marriage” — an unmistakable dig at the actress’ former marriage to Tom Cruise.
The one-star review in Guardian proclaimed it even worse than last year’s “horrendous” flop biopic of Princess Diana starring Naomi Watts — and also ran a photo spread unfavorably comparing the film’s fashi♔ons to those worn by the real Princess Grace.
Empire Magazine said the fiღlm “is often side-splittingly funny . . . the trouble is, it’s not actually meant to be funny.”
Meanwhile, Variety reported that a new deal has been reached for the Wei♈nstein Co. to release the film in later summer or early this fall — but at a heavily discounted fee of $2 million. That’s reportedly $3 million less than the original deal with the film’s French producers, though there will now be “incentives built in based on box-office performance.”
The trade publication had earlie𝓰r reported that Harvey Weinstein, who has postponed the film’s US release twice, disliked director Olivier D๊ahan’s movie — and prepared his own version, which Dahan publicly condemned.
Weinstein will not be at Wednesday night’s premiere — the H💙ollywood Reporter quot💎ed him as saying he’s on a “long-planned” trip to refugee camps in the Middle East.
“I’m wishing Olivier, Nicole [and] the ‘Grace of Monaco’ te♔am💟 all the best for the screening in Cannes tonight,” the mogul said.
At the film’s press conference, director Dahan said: “I wanted to make a film about cinema — it’s all about an actress. It’s 🐟not a biopic, even if it’s all true.”
The film’s accuracy ha꧟s been questioned by Princess Grace’s children and other members of the Mona🍷co royal family, who are boycotting the premiere.