Really Surprised!

Purely Joyful Movie!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I am always amazed at how many reviewer seem to pick apart and over analyze movies looking for all kinds of hidden meanings and some deep backstory. I think most people just watch films for the shear entertainment value. This movie was just a fun to watch with some adventure, a relationship story line, some parts of just craziness, suspense and laughs. Gee what a concept! And since it is not full of cussing, sex and killing should attract a larger audience to enjoy it. Some critics have written it too far-fetched and not believable. Sure, but no more than all the totally unbelievable adventure movies that have such fantastic action stunts that no human could possible live through. Hey their movies. Sit back, relax and enjoy. I'd recommend this movie to anyone.

I've worked at blockbuster. I've worked a Hollywood video. I've seen thousands of movies.This breaks the top 100 all time for me.Apparently my review wasn't long enough.....hm.....The acting was great, the main character was zany, the chemistry and relationship of the two (evan rachel wood and michael douglass) was sensational throughout, and the movie just felt.....i don't know....unconventional. Something new, something fresh, something that I hadn't been seen done before - not like this. I wonder if Michael Douglass hit that......

A comedy that doesn't have its first laugh out loud moment until it's more than halfway over and then takes an oddly unjustified turn into the maudlin at the end isn't usually going to be that good. Add in a gratingly whimsical soundtrack that makes you feel like someone is constantly tapping you on the forehead with a spatula and you've got something that should suck. Fortunately for King Of California, Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood paddle fast enough as actors to keep the whole movie from going over the edge and down the Niagara Falls of crappy cinema.Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) is a 16 year old girl who lives alone in a big old house, drives a ramshackle station wagon and works at McDonald's. She's all alone because her mother ran off when she was nine and her father Charlie (Michael Douglas) has been in a state mental institution for the last 2 years. Charlie gets out and moves back in with Miranda, his bipolar looniness largely intact, and drags his daughter in a treasure hunt for lost Spanish gold from 1624. They wander the countryside, following decoded instructions from an old missionary's journal, eventually winding up breaking into a Costco and digging through the floor. That's where King of California takes a severe right turn out of indulgently amusing and into arbitrary drama with an ending that can be understood in two different ways, though I'm not sure these filmmakers could tell you which was the right way.Everything that's right about this movie flows out of the performances of Douglas and Wood. Charlie is a wonderful character who stumbles along the edge of mental health, never wanting to go over but never wanting to move back to where it's completely safe. Miranda is adorable as a young woman who can't deny her love for her father, no matter how much she might want to. Douglas and Wood are marvelous in crafting a relationship where it's never clear how much Charlie is pulling Miranda after him and how much she's walking arm in arm with him just so she can be close to her spacey dad. With the two of them almost constantly on screen together, King Of California is almost constantly enjoyable.Put two lesser actors in those roles and this film would have crashed hard and burned harder because there's so many things wrong with it. As previously mentioned, there are hardly any jokes for the first 50 minutes of this supposed comedy and not many more attempts at feeble situational humor. And outside of a few short flashbacks, there's also no actual drama in the movie until the very end. The viewer's interest has to entirely float along on the good feelings engendered by Douglas and Wood. And when the script does plunge into dramatics, it's so out of place and awkward it feels like the whole movie swallowed some mood-altering pharmaceutical. Drama needs conflict to survive and there just isn't any here. Charlie is portrayed as kooky but otherwise completely functional. Flashbacks show 9 year old Miranda suffering through a childhood of her mother's abandonment and her father's depression, but grown up Miranda doesn't show a single emotional or psychological scar from the experience. These are fundamentally happy people living fundamentally happy lives, despite all challenges, which is okay but not the stuff of wrenching emotional climaxes.King of California is an almost disaster that is salvaged into watchability by its male and female leads, proving that a movie doesn't have to be good at everything as long as it's great at one thing.

Can totally confirm that last comment.. Didn't exspect that much before renting that DVD, but after all it was quite a nice surprise to see Michael Douglas' extraordinary performance and that of Evan rachel Wood, which is also one of the greatest performer nowadays. No clichés, no unnessesary over-the-top changes in storytelling, just a nice little film, calm and professionally narrated about father and daughter and the apparently mazy visions which turn out to be not just visionary. Everyone did a great job on this, and hopefully there'll be more brilliant moments in film history in the near future..