KING ARTHUR -
THE LEGEND OF THE SWORD
Director : Guy Ritchie
Year : 2017
Genre : Fantasy
Rating : *
From the earliest days of the moving image, filmmakers have attempted to put their own unique spins on the myth of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Some have been good ('Monty Python & The Holy Grail', 'Camelot') and some have been not so good ('Excalibur', 'King Arthur').
However, no matter how bad some of these movies may have been, you'll be hard pushed to find one as utterly stupid and as tediously dull as 'King Arthur - The Legend Of The Sword', Guy Ritchie's preposterously overblown testosterone-fuelled box-office disaster that has none of the magic, wonder or adventure expected from a typical Arthurian themed picture - there's not even a mention of Lancelot, Guinevere or Galahad - but it does have giant CGI snakes, bullet-time kung fu fight scenes, a villain that speaks to octopus women and a hilariously inept cameo from David Beckham.
A wobbly accented Charlie Hunnam stars as the titular Arthur, a young Mockney lad from "Sarf Landon" (or Londinium as they call it here) who, after pulling the sword Excalibur from the rock, quickly finds himself on the wrong side of the snarling Vortigern - a power-hungry psychopath played by Jude Law who has used dark magic to usurp the throne of England. With his rag-tag group of friends as well as a beautiful yet beguiling mage (Astrid Berges -Frisbey) by his side, Arthur must learn to control the power of the sword, defeat the evil Vortigern and take his rightful place as King.
To his credit, Ritchie really does try his absolute hardest to keep our attention for the full two hours we spend with this movie. All of the idiosyncratic visual invention he has become famous for is on show here and as is usually the case with his films, it is shot in the same boisterously entertaining style that made his 1998 debut feature 'Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels' such a big commercial hit. But what worked for 'Lock, Stock...', 'Snatch' and even the genre-defying 'Sherlock Holmes' movies isn't necessarily going to work with everything he does and try as he might, no amount of slow-motion or quick-cut editing was going to make the inherent ridiculousness of 'King Arthur - The Legend Of The Sword' anything but moderately tolerable.
However, thanks to a distractingly anachronistic script, unanimously poor performances and an overuse of horrible CGI, it isn't even that. It's a loud, undisciplined, annoying and downright ugly mess of a film that miraculously manages to turn one of the greatest legends of all time into one of the most dreary cinema experiences you're likely to have this, or any other year. If Guy Ritchie is going to helm the live-action re-imagining of Disney's classic 'Aladdin' in the near future, he is going to have to work out what is more important; style or story.
However, thanks to a distractingly anachronistic script, unanimously poor performances and an overuse of horrible CGI, it isn't even that. It's a loud, undisciplined, annoying and downright ugly mess of a film that miraculously manages to turn one of the greatest legends of all time into one of the most dreary cinema experiences you're likely to have this, or any other year. If Guy Ritchie is going to helm the live-action re-imagining of Disney's classic 'Aladdin' in the near future, he is going to have to work out what is more important; style or story.
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