As my closest followers know, my newly-crowned favorite movie of all time is The Prince of Egypt, which has sat in the top 4 since I got Letterboxd. It is a biblical adaptation done right—grand, heroic, and complex—so when Angel Studios started throwing around this “The King of Kings is the first major animated Biblical epic since The Prince of Egypt” rhetoric, I had to see it, if only to disprove its crazy claims. While I would love another Biblical epic that could stand alongside The Prince of the Egypt, The King of Kings isn’t it.

There was nothing overtly terrible about this film, but it lacked the expert artistry and narrative ambition of its contemporaries. The story laid out in The King of Kings was about as interesting as reading the Biblical texts. That isn’t a good thing here, since film has the clear advantage of visual storytelling as well as linguistic, but they played it safe and told the story by the book (literally). It seemed like there were a few times the writers wanted to say more—Walter Dickens begins to postulate that someone could cherry-pick the Bible’s texts to manipulate others and gets frustratingly interrupted by his father, for example—and it seems they chickened out. Despite these shortcomings, the iconic moments from the story of Jesus never fell flat, even if they could’ve been improved upon.

The animation occasionally aided the storytelling, with some very pretty backgrounds and impressively good lighting, but I really couldn’t get behind the rudimentary character designs. I have no idea why they made Jesus a literal Chad (voiced by Oscar Isaac—though he did great, that’s a funny pick), and many characters lacked variance or personality. And if you looked closely, there were a few faraway characters that could magically talk without opening their mouths (I saw you, innkeeper)!

It’s hard to get too upset about the quality of the animation—clearly the crowdfunded budget went to the voice actors, which was money well-spent—but it occasionally did detract from my enjoyment of the film. Visually, Jesus was sometimes hard to take seriously, but Oscar Isaac gave him some life. All of the voice actors did a great job, actually, and what a star-studded cast it was! Either the entire aforementioned budget went to the voice cast, or all of those Brits (and Isaac and Hamill) just really love Jesus.

Lastly, the framing device was unique, no doubt, but while it was mostly inoffensive, there were a few shots and sequences ruined by the omnipresence of Walter Dickens and his dumb cat. The scene that stuck in my mind was Peter after he betrays Jesus; the man was mourning, weeping on a cliff side set against a beautiful multi-colored sky, and in walks Walter Dickens to ruin the moment. I’m fine with this story being filtered for kids, but adults are gonna watch this, too, and this one in particular had had enough of Walter and Willa’s interjections by the end of the movie.

I know it sounds like I hated The King of Kings, but I promise I had a decent enough time and don’t mean to poo-poo on this film as much as I did. I just have high expectations when it comes to Biblical adaptations, and I was hoping to have another heavy-hitter to show to my kids down the line, but The King of Kings—in all of its overwhelming mediocrity—probably won’t see the light of day in the future Smith house unless someone really goes hunting on the streaming services.