Netflix’s The Royal Treatment – A Forgettably Fluffy Romance

Since its inception, Netflix has been a cesspool of romance films for better or worse. Let’s face it, they’re easy to make while more or less following the same formula, and still continue to find viewers so there has been little reason to stop making them. The Royal Treatment is another one. Suffice it to say that viewers should not be expecting anything different which may not necessarily be the worst thing. The preexisting audience of this subgenre will be right at home here with its good-looking characters that they can live vicariously through while others will almost definitely not be changing their minds. The beauty of a streaming platform such as Netflix is that fans of certain genres, not just romance films, will flock towards what they like and scroll past whatever they won’t like. This will likely be the fate of this film in the eyes of most viewers but in spite of that, it will still find an audience. Though certainly not the best that the genre has to offer, the film does enough to get by off the backs of the decent chemistry of its two leads.

As a film, The Royal Treatment is not original by any means which shouldn’t exactly come as much of a surprise to anyone who bothers to look past the good-looking nature of the film’s seemingly polar opposite main characters who were inevitably not by the end. In the end, it is merely a series of cliche and contrived plot threads and obnoxiously-stereotype characters wrapped in a smattering of cheese that will feel longer than its 97 minute running time. The story follows a woman named Isabella (Marano), a headstrong New York City hairdresser who caught the eye of a man named Thomas (Massoud) a prince of a fictional Eastern-European country who also happened to be set to marry a woman named Destiny (Crayford) for whom he did not love. From there, their relationship got even more complicated once her and her more obnoxious stylist friends were tasked to do the hair for the upcoming royal wedding.

The predictable nature of the film makes it a chore to watch, knowing the ultimate outcome simply by looking at the poster. Meanwhile, it provides little to no reason to care about the trajectory from the beginning to that outcome which was Isabella and Thomas together. That being said, they did see their ups and downs as the film went out of its way to show how different the two characters were. However, even though they seemed different on paper, they were arguably more alike than they probably thought. Thomas needed Isabella and her normalness to remind him of that and show him how to really live. Living a sheltered life in the royal family, Thomas was groomed to become his country’s next leader therefore he never really lived and was blind to the world and people around him.

If there was one thing The Royal Treatment did right, it was that Isabella and Thomas were somewhat fun to watch outside of each of their circumstances as she showed the prince how to live and be a better person through her bubbly personality. Those wholesome moments were a brief yet temporary distraction from what was a subpar film for the most part. While Marano and Massoud were somewhat fun to watch as Isabella and Thomas, they were better together than apart and followed suit with the lazy writing and direction that each only took them so far. Marano, an Italian New York City stereotype, was palatable but her even more obnoxious New York city stereotype friends will be a challenge. Massoud, meanwhile, just couldn’t carry the emotional weight of his character’s responsibility.

At the end of the day, The Royal Treatment is what it is, something that doesn’t add to the conversation and exists for no other reason but to pad the Netflix library.

still courtesy of Netflix

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.