Deacon King Kong

Bit of a roller coaster: starts off pretty awful, with characters who are tedious unselfaware automatons. Then a quarter of the way in it gets promising, with hints of inner life, complexity, nuance — not really believable, but I felt willing to go with it — and then it just seesaws back and forth, with moments of lucidity and reflection amid a baseline of vapidity.

There's romance: two independent (and laughably improbable) love-at-first-sight tropes. Slapstick: the multiple last-minute escapes from the hired goon are played for humor, right? Intrigue, and Preaching, and Flawed But Basically Decent People, and a Nice Pat Wrapping-Up at the end.

It was almost three stars, but the frequent pattern of characters Mutually Understanding Each Other wore me out. That's adolescent wishful-thinking connection, not messy real-world connection.