IMDb plot summary: In 1880s India, two former British soldiers decide to set themselves up as Kings in Kafiristan, a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.
Directed by John Huston. Starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer.
The Man Who Would Be King stars Michael Caine and Sean Connery as two British officers who decide to, on their own, head into a remote Eurasian country full of individual warring tribes and conquer it. This was an odd movie to watch, and I'm still not at all sure what to make of it. It's set up like a jaunty heist movie, but underpinning the whole thing is the fact that it's all about a group of entitled British men deciding to take over a non-white country. While there's a little bit of self-awareness in this -- they are ultimately unsuccessful in their goal, and it indicates that their hubris was a big part of it, which is compelling -- but I'm not sure that it was *wholly* convinced its protagonists were the bad guys, just that they did their colonizing badly. And it leans into and supports so many tropes about non-white civilizations that I was just uncomfortable much of the time. I'd like to see this story retold either in a way that is more confidently critical of our leads or, at the very least, in a way that recentered the stories of the people at the heart of the conflict. There may be more nuance to this narrative than I found, but it ultimately felt too much like a colonization romp for me to get into it.
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Man Who Would Be King < Love Exposure
The Man Who Would Be King > Ulysses
The Man Who Would Be King > Company (1997)
The Man Who Would Be King > The Stalking Moon
The Man Who Would Be King > Pitch Perfect 2
The Man Who Would Be King < The Harder They Fall
The Man Who Would Be King > Power
The Man Who Would Be King < Something the Lord Made
The Man Who Would Be King < Star Trek: Nemesis
The Man Who Would Be King > Candyman (2021)
The Man Who Would Be King > Hellboy
The Man Who Would Be King > Q & A
Final spot: #2056 out of 3941, or 48%.
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