Review: All Hail the King

The King is not pleased at all. 

We’re going to close out the month with the All Hail The King short. Why? One, it’s a short I haven’t seen before. Two, it ties into Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, as I know it covers the actual Mandarin’s response to Trevor Slattery’s impersonation of him for Aldrich Killian. And three, I’m just really tired. Hope no one minds. Kay? Kay. Let’s get to it, shall we?

 

The short opens with a quote from King Lear “Come not between the Dragon and his wrath.” Spooky. We’re then introduced to Jackson Norris, a television reporter who is doing his final interview with Trevor, the man who was thought to be the Mandarin. We’re shown some archival footage of Trevor as the Mandarin and then cut over t o his arrest. Norris comments that Trevor seems oblivious to both his work, and to pretty much everything besides his own growing celebrity status. Ohh, Trevor is flying too close to the sun me thinks.

 

Simple poster for a simple story.

Trevor is brought in and we see the other inmates cheer him on as he walks, and that he’s gotten a Captain America Shield Tattoo on the back of his neck. Trevor enters Seagate Prison’s mess hall, where he’s met by his very large fellow inmate and I guess… secretary… Herman. Herman reminds him of the interview at 3 with Norris as they find a place to sit, and lamenting that Trevor didn’t take an exclusive with 60 Minutes, to which Trevor loudly proclaims he’ll never work with CBS again. He runs into another inmate when Herman runs to get him chocolate milk and maybe kale. The other inmate isn’t impressed with Trevor and promises to kill him. Herman and Trevor’s “fanbase” gather, protecting Trevor. He walks up to the other prisoner, Dave, and tells him to kiss Trevor’s rings. Dave tells him he isn’t the Mandarin or even a real criminal, but Trevor is still high on his own legend, claiming he inhabited the role so completely he has become it. One of his fans, Fletcher, asks him to do the voice, which he does after “complaining” a little. He puts on the shades and does the “And you’ll never see me coming” line.

 

Trevor begins his interview with Norris. Trevor is still out of it, doing vocal warm ups while Norris tries to get him to talk about SOMETHING. Trevor’s cell is pretty nice, with Trevor admitting that these are all amenities he earned from rolling on his AIM connections. Trevor claims to miss his Ketamine and the birds, but he’s making due. They finally get down to the interview, Norris mentioning that they’ve covered his recruitment by Killian, the AIM thinktank combining aspects of successful terrorists to make the Mandarin characters and how Trevor “brought him to life” his words, but wants Trevor to answer the question Norris is asked most often, “how could he not know what was going on?” Trevor claims it was the lovely drugs that kept him in the darks.

 

He wants to know more about Trevor, since the AIM guys hid his past really well. Trevor tries to make it sound like he’s keeping things hidden, but then Norris brings out an old photo he found of Trevor from an archive with his mother outside the Royal Court theater. It was when he got his firsts role in the Tempest. He was very close to his mother, apparently, but he wasn’t with her when she died. He was in the US at the time with CBS doing a pilot called Caged Heat where he was an avenging Russian Police Cop with anger issues let loose on Los Angeles. He wishes he had a copy, and Norris reveals he found the original pilot. Looks a lot like any bad 80s tv show. He claims that the show was too sophisticated for the network, and that that was the break that broke him.

A simple interview goes off the rails, hard.

 

Norris points out that Trevor likes to talk about his life like a series of miss opportunities and bad luck but that he never takes responsibilities for his own failures. He claims that he is responsible to his muse, and that he’s “not a bloody rocket surgeon.” Norris points out that Trevor’s “portrayal” of the Mandarin has angered many people and some of them are very dangerous. Trevor thinks he’s talking trolls on the internet, but Norris says it’s actually the Ten Rings terrorist group he should be worried about. He tells Trevor that the Ten Rings is historically associated with the Mandarin, that they were dormant for a while but are becoming more active since Trevor’s arrest. We’re shown images of Raza, the leader of the Ten Rings cell Tony dealt with in Iron Man, images of Mongol leaders, the Ten Rings symbol and so on. Trevor is shocked and impressed that the group is real. Norris asks Trevor what he means by that, since he claimed to have researched this role thoroughly, but that turns out to be code for an actor wasting time to Trevor.

 

Norris takes off his coat, hits a switch on the camera and begins telling Trevor about the Mandarin. That he is a warrior king that has been inspiring men through the Middle Ages or father back in time. Trevor, not picking up the vibe, asks who the hell cares. No one cares about the Mandarin, he claims, people will remember the role he played and that he played it bloody well. We get a close up of the inners of the camera, in inner chamber of which is clearly using some Transformium to convert the inside of it into a gun! Norris admits that Trevor is right, and for that sin, he’ll suffer a hole in his body for every ring of their faith. Norris grabs the gun and shoots most of Trevor’s crew. Herman lasts the longest, but is pinned on the ground by Norris and stabbed with a knife he also smuggled in. Trevor gets the gun, though, and points it at Norris. Norris isn’t impressed and says Trevor won’t kill him. Trevor tries to play it tough, but Norris easily disarms him. He tells Trevor to consider this a lesson in what’s real and what is not, revealing he has a Ten Rings tattoo on his forearm. Trevor begs for his life, but then Norris reveals he’s not here to kill him, he’s there to break him out. He calls in the extraction and we hear gun fire and screams outside. Norris tells him that someone wants to meet him. Trevor doesn’t get it, asks if he knows who he is going to meet. Norris makes it even clearer by saying “no, but you stole his name.” Trevor still doesn’t get it as the credits roll. Oy.

 

Oh, and there’s a mid-credit scene where we’re shown the other big Iron Man villain in prison, Justin Hammer, complaining that Trevor is such a big deal to the other in mates to his own prison butler. “I had a robot army,” he complains, “what’s he got? He’s got some dumb accent.” And as the credits continue to roll, he complains that Pepper Potts is on the cover of Forbes.

 

So that was a fun little short. And to think, this exists mostly because some fans were freaking pissed that they did the Mandarin so dirty in Iron Man 3. Seriously, they word it nicer than that in facts about the production, but they do more or less state this was an apology for making the Mandarin less than what he is in the comics. Ben Kingsley is great as the very spaced out, possibly somehow still high, Trevor Slattery. The bit before Norris, Scooty McNairy, pulled the switch on the interview was particularly well done. He was so high on himself that he couldn’t tell when Norris was going full psycho on him. Love it. And I got to give a shout out to Lester Speight. He didn’t get much to do in this, but I enjoyed the bait and switch moment in the cafeteria and the fact that Herman seems genuinely invested in helping Trevor do well in prison. Oh, and big, big shout out to Sam Rockwell’s bits at the end. Fun fact, he almost didn’t do the short, because Rockwell was busy doing the Poltergeist remake at the time. But, after reading the script he called up the director Drew Pearce and said that if they could shoot his scene in an hour in Toronto, he was in. Pearce did just that and said that Rockwell just came in and nailed it. So yeah, this was a fun short that opened up the possibility for a truer to the source Mandarin that they’re finally acting on in Shang-Chi coming out on September 3. It took them seven years, but, hey, the results look good if the reviews are any indication. But I’ll get back to you on that front in a few days. Have a good night, everybody!

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