TV Movie Review: Call Her King on BET+

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"Call Her King" is a decently fun tweak on the “Die Hard” formula with a hint of social justice behind it.
by Jeremy Fogelman

Cast: Naturi Naughton, Lance Gross, Jason Mitchell, Johnny Messner, Nicholas Turturro, Tobias Truvillion, Garrett Hendricks, Shiobann Amisial, Action, Thriller
Rating: ★★

I think that the “Die Hard in a Something” formula has been done a thousand times over by this point, because it’s just such a compelling narrative. Has any Die Hard clone or ripoff ever managed to be better than the original? Probably not, but there are good ones like Con Air and not so good ones like Under Siege. So with that high and low bar, there’s no reason to worry about doing your best.

Call Her King comes from writer/director Wes Miller and stars Naturi Naughton as Judge Jaeda King, who trains in martial arts in the opening montages to make sure we know she’s ready for the inevitable fighting to come. Her homelife isn’t particularly great, with a fractured relationship with her out-of-work husband and not wanting to alarm her young daughter. This relationship is just a little bit of back story though, it’s not really a big part of the story, only something to be quickly referenced a few times and wrapped up in a bow at the end of the movie.

The actual relationship is a more complicated one -- a young man, Sean Samuels (Jason Mitchell), is on trial for murder with the death penalty on the line, while his brother Gabriel (Lance Gross), the CEO of a security firm, plots to figure out a way to help him. Gabriel has a bit of a complicated motivation here, with a reasonable part wanting to keep his brother alive and stamp out systemic injustices in the prison system (and this part of the plot is a little shaky, as they have some “hacker” types on his payroll we keep cutting back to but we have no idea what they’re up to until nearly the end of the movie).

But his actions aren’t so reasonable, depending on how you look at it, as he and his team of security professionals break into the courtroom and kill a lot of innocent people and take the rest hostage. Jaeda, in the middle of sentencing, has to flee along with the bailiff (Johnny Messner, legitimately badass in many scenes), Sean’s attorney (funnyman character actor Nicholas Turturro) and Sean, who worries that his brother might be there to kill them all.

There’s a badass lieutenant lady (Shiobann Amisial) that you just know will have a showdown at some point -- I wouldn’t say her character is written in a particularly deep or complex way, but the performance is the fun side of intimidating and you can easily root for her to go down.

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Naturally Jaeda must eventually get in on the fighting, but although she is the main protagonist of the movie (I mean the movie is called Call Her King after all), it gets a little muddled when it cuts back to Gabriel. Gabriel, calling himself 'Black Caesar' in a pretty self-aggrandizing way, decides to put on a mock trial of a sort, bringing the lead prosecutor up to the stand and revealing all of his corrupt and (honestly) illegal actions to ensure that an innocent man dies.

Although we do get some final reveals that completely upend that perspective, and although the action part of the movie is fun, with Naturi Naughton as an engaging and charismatic lead, and the social justice message understandable and almost reasonable, the nature of the mixed up actions means that the film’s heroes and villains are a little unclear. Not so much in the “shades of gray” but more in the “who is the film even rooting for?” perspective, although I appreciate that the filmmaker wanted to add more depth to this Die Hard in a courtroom movie.

At a breezy hour and 40 minutes or so, the movie paces out its action and courtroom scenes well, and even if the themes are a little confused, the actors are fun and the movie consistently entertaining. A pretty decent sort of mild action tale overall.

Call Her King is streaming on BET+. Click the icons below to subscribe to BET+.