King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
When the child Arthur’s father is murdered, Vortigern, Arthur’s uncle, seizes the crown. Robbed of his birthright and with no idea who he truly is, Arthur comes up the hard way in the back alleys of the city. But once he pulls the sword Excalibur from the stone, his life is turned upside down and he is forced to acknowledge his true legacy... whether he likes it or not.
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42 films that influenced King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
What critics say influenced King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
I know I said “dramatic possibilities,” but it would be personally disingenuous of me to pretend that I’ve seen a greater Arthurian movie than “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
The brash British director has thrown out nearly all preexisting Athurian notions and come up with a smoking new riff on the famous sword-in-the-stone tale that makes “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” look like a work of rigorous historical scholarship by comparison.
Co-written by Ritchie, his screenwriting partner Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold (the upcoming “Robin Hood” revival), “Legend of the Sword” may be the most entertaining Arthurian movie since “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — not that they’re in any way similar.
It’s a story that’s been told before, in cartoon form and in live action, on TV and in film, from the glorious absurdity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the dreadful 2004 King Arthur which wasted a perfectly good actor in Clive Owen.
To borrow a Monty Python and the Holy Grail tagline, Ritchie’s King Arthur is “another film completely different from some of the other films which aren’t quite the same as this one is.”
Ritchie has been getting a lot of grief for this, but while his movie doesn’t really work, he hasn’t committed sacrilege – Monty Python and the Holy Grail showed that audiences were ready to laugh at the forests-and-fog fustiness of classic versions, and Antoine Fuqua had no lock with his straight-faced King Arthur.
It strikes me, too, that this is the film I'd hoped Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was going to be almost thirty years ago.
The closest thing to a fun performance—and it is still a very long distance from actually being that—is the one turned in by Jude Law, who takes a blatantly campy approach to his performance as Vortigern that is basically a ripoff of Alan Rickman’s memorable turn in the otherwise unmemorable “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” that does inspire a laugh or two.
Despite some striking visuals (including sweeping use of Welsh and Scottish locations) and the occasional evocation of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, this newfangled Arthur comes up short on grandeur or even old-fashioned matinee adventure, trading them in for cosmetic Game of Thrones grot.
Rather, he comes across as an aging rebel worried about being judged un-hip, clearly over-compensating in order to remain one step ahead of fellow stylists Zack Snyder (“300”), Tarsem Singh (“Mirror Mirror”), and Alex Proyas (“Gods of Egypt”) — all of whose genuinely outrageous, inadvertently awful work appears to be a source of inspiration here.
Which is somehow a good thing: Rather than a bone dry, boring version of King Arthur, we get this rock and roll version, which has elements of “300,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Clash of the Titans” baked into its DNA.
Está bien que un cineasta quiera hacer escenas al estilo de “300”, pero hay que usarlas en la medida justa, especialmente si los efectos digitales no acompañan y se ven falsos.
The battles involve ’roided-up, muscular warriors leaping through the air in slow motion, 300 -style.
This time out he reaches back even farther to the legend of King Arthur, a story he once again feels the need to tamper with until it resembles a "300" styled comic book super hero origin story of the old tale.
The movies, of course, would seem to have already exhausted the sheer range of dramatic possibilities where the once and future king is concerned, from the tragic romanticism of “Camelot” (1967) and the lushly enveloping fantasy of “Excalibur” (1981) to the dour, unsentimental realism of “King Arthur” (2004).
John Boorman’s “Excalibur” remains the definitive telling of this tale, but “King Arthur” isn’t really “that” tale.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword isn’t going to dethrone Excalibur as the definitive King Arthur film.
Think John Boorman’s “Excalibur” meets Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”
En el caso del cine, hemos tenido versiones animadas, interpretaciones tradicionales como “Excalibur” o “Primer Caballero”, e incluso supuestas “versiones históricas” como “Rey Arturo”, de Antoine Fuqua, la cual se basó, muy ligeramente, en eventos y personajes reales para desarrollar una historia un poco más verosímil (bueno, al menos esa era la intención).
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The kids have Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone” (1963) and foreign-film fans have Robert Bresson’s “Lancelot du Lac” (1974).
But this expensive bit of widescreen nightsoil only makes you yearn for the simple Sunday pictures of "Prince Valiant"; even the child's "The Sword in the Stone" looms like a leviathan in comparison.
For those who grew up with "The Sword in the Stone", "Camelot" and even "Excalibur", this movie with absolutely no romance will come as a shock - and this is the first installment in a reported series.
Unfortunately, “Arthur” is rarely at its best, bogged down in countless CGI sequences of battlefields or monsters (I’m hoping Ritchie’s inclusion of rodents of unusual size was meant as a shout-out to “The Princess Bride,” but I have my doubts).
Are the giant rats Arthur fights in one ridiculous montage a nod to the Rodents of Unusual Size in “The Princess Bride”?
Arthur also evokes the Stone Table from Narnia , the lost baby king in a boat and rounding up of young men from the Bible, and the R.O.U.S.es from The Princess Bride .
Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur was the last costly wannabe blockbuster to ask what Arthurian legend would be like if it were boring, and before that, there was Jerry Zucker’s First Knight .
In the opening sequence alone, an assault on Camelot features armored siege elephants right out of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King , an unwieldy reference point that feels dated in 2017.
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And this isn’t Alien: Covenant, which took almost an hour to show any aliens; action fans should be satisfied that man against monster happens right upfront, and the climactic battle suggests that Ritchie was a Masters of the Universe fan as a kid.
I love all this stuff in theory—it’s not far from what Martin Scorsese did in “ The Last Temptation of Christ ,” populating ancient Jerusalem with New Yorkers, Midwesterners and Brits who spoke in their native accents and used modern slang, slicing and dicing the action into music video beats, and scoring the whole thing with Peter Gabriel ’s chants and synth beats.