Bene Cumb The movie focuses on two main characters - a mentally ill musician who believes he has discovered buried treasure and is ready to go to the extreme for it, and his teenage daughter struggling alone to make ends meet. Within 1,5 hours, we see them consenting and disagreeing, as their recent years have been so different - the parent in a closed institution leading "calm" life, the daughter had to leave school and start coping in "real", hectic life. The pace is, however, not even, some scenes are unnecessary or protracted, turns appear arduously, but thanks to Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood as leading characters, it is not boring to watch; Douglas, above all, gives a performance not customary to him, proving again that he is a strong and versatile actor.If you have followed Sundance movies, you would likely appreciate King of California as well.

Matt Kracht This isn't the kind of movie that I usually watch, and I think that I'm pretty far out of its target demographic. However, I figured that I'd take a chance, given that I was bored and feeling open-minded. At times, I was worried that King of California would descend into insipid and clichéd family-friendly themes, but it kept surprising me with a bit of subversiveness or social commentary. Michael Douglas's character serves as the classic "wise fool", an ostensibly foolish character who nonetheless imparts great wisdom, due in no small part to his inability to properly socialize in polite society. His daughter, more inhibited and straight-laced, learns to think outside the box, trust her instincts, question authority, follow her dreams, etc. By the end of the movie, I was half-expecting her to join some New Age cult and/or dye her hair purple.The pacing really slows down to a crawl sometimes, but, overall, it's a fairly good movie with a message that should resonate with nonconformists, hippies, and madmen.

MBunge 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.

Kyle Hodgdon I thought this was a pretty good little movie when I watched it in 2010. For some reason, I had never really heard of it prior to 2010, so it was a good one to stumble across. Quite early in the adventure, I began suspecting that Charlie was just stringing Miranda along on his mission for the sole purpose of spending time with her, all the while doing something that would free her from her mundane life as a McDonalds employee. I guess the end of the movie does not really make it 100% clear as to if that was the case, or if he was really just crazy, or if he was correct and there was really treasure and he was on the verge of obtaining it.It felt to me that this film attempted to be a treasure hunting movie, something that would not normally take place in current times, and set it in the twenty-first century. I think that is pretty daring because it is a difficult thing to achieve. I feel that this movie did it pretty well. The troubles of a Costco over the dig site made sense in reality and also added some humor and a roadblock to the action. There were a number of times when you kind of had to ignore reality and just go with what was happening (example: the cops just ignored the initial break-in as a gas leak), but I was okay with that.I really enjoyed this movie and would actually give it a 7.5 if I could.