Rainbow Prince Review – One Shade of Cringe

The 2022 Filipino series ‘Rainbow Prince’ promised to be a Disney-like LGBT musical series about a fictional Prince fleeing his kingdom and falling in love with a commoner. Directed by Xion Lim, the show stars Adrian Dionisio as Prince Zeyn and Eurwin Canzana as Mikey. What follows is a absurd looking series, with an underwhelming story-line and bland characters.

Plot overview – Prince Zeyn who is next in line to be King, is forced to leave his country Zurbania with two trusted confidantes, because his uncle wants to grab power and get rid of him. The three then try to lay lie in a fancy hotel in the Phillipines under fake aliases, where Zeyn is immediately smitten by hotel tour-guide Mikey. So while hired-killers are in pursuit of the Prince, the Prince is in pursuit of Mikey, who in turn already has his hands full with a clingy ex-boyfriend trying to patch things up.

The two actors are mediocre at best, delivering performances that look like rehearsals for a school play and their chemistry is just AWKWARD AF. Adrian Dionisio who was only 18 at the time of the shoot, looks his age, so he gives of a regular average shy teen vibe than the suave-confident future King the character is supposed to be. He literally struggles with some of his lines and has a hard time delivering dialogues. Eurwin Canzana fares a little better as the actual average boy, but that’s not saying much.

‘Oxin Films’ the production house has visibly spent a decent amount of money on making this show, if only they had put a bigger fraction of their budget into better acting coaches, ‘Rainbow Prince’ would’ve been more bearable. I lost complete interest by episode 5 and just super-fast-forwarded the remaining episodes.

There are a lot of songs (remember, it’s a musical show), but the music is also very average, nothing one would want to listen to again. Most of them are skip-worthy, like the one featuring a dog in a pram (not even kidding), which was just cringe-y. They even give the evil uncle who wants to be the king a song! And it’s bad enough that the show has too many supporting actors, but pretty much all of them get a number to croon too. Why?

Okay, I don’t want this to turn into a never-ending rant, so time to end the review now. It’s less than a 5/10 from me, but it’s hard to put an exact number on it, so let’s leave it at that. Just watch something else.