Peyton Elizabeth Lee is charming enough as Sam, the second-born princess in a royal family in the Kingdom of Illyria. If you’re expecting some sort of Narnia-esque vision of fantasy royalty, look elsewhere because the vision here is pretty much superficial. It’s a modern, slightly futuristic city, but “world-building” was literally never put on the whiteboard of the writer’s room for this project. Sam goes to school at a place called Strathmore with other royal teens and the opening act of “Secret Society of Second-Born Royals” (and doesn’t that title just roll off the tongue?) is basically a teen dramedy as the film introduces us to Sam’s friend Mike (Noah Lomax) and a vain mean girl named Roxana (Olivia Deeble).
Suddenly, Sam learns that she has an important destiny a la Harry/Katniss/Neo/etc. It turns out that second-born royals in this universe have superpowers, and so “SSSBR” shifts to what is essentially a young X-Men riff with Sam learning her powers under the tutelage of Professor James Morrow (Skylar Astin). Each student’s power reveals itself through a series of training exercises, and Sam learns that she has super senses. Her fellow second-borns, who have apparently all hit X-puberty at the same time, include invisible girl Roxana, power-stealing January (Isabella Blake-Thomas), persuasive Tuma (Niles Fitch), and nature-controlling Matteo (Faly Rakotohavana). The quintet is trained to control their powers just as the film’s Magneto, a telekinetic inmate baddie (Greg Bryk), escapes from his prison and comes after the school.
To say that Anna Mastro’s film has a pacing problem would be a drastic understatement. The opening chapter is fine enough because it allows Lee to carry the teen drama, but everything grinds to a halt in the midsection with a lengthy, boring training sequence. Imagine if the first X-Men film was an hour of the characters learning their powers. It’s numbing in a way that’s inexplicable other than to suggest it would feel different in a pilot of a series than it does as the majority of a feature film. It’s a film that just takes forever to get off the ground, running for an hour before anything approaching traditional superhero movie action happens, and even then it’s clunky and poorly done.
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