BEFORE: Happy St. Patrick's Day! At least I'm sort of in the right part of the world, watching a film that takes place in the U.K. This is a more updated animated version of the King Arthur story (I think), which starts with Arthur (in flashback) pulling Excalibur from the stone - so this sort of picks up right where last night's film left off...
THE PLOT: An adventurous girl, a young blind hermit and a goofy two headed dragon race to find the lost sword Excalibur to save King Arthur and Camelot.
AFTER: Sort of disappointing, I'd hoped this would center more on Arthur, but the central character is a young girl named Kayley, the daughter of a knight, who wants to perform heroic deeds herself - very proto-feminist for the Middle Ages. She gets her chance when an evil ex-knight named Ruber (voiced by Gary Oldman) tries to steal Excalibur, and it gets lost in the Forbidden Forest.
Kayley heads into the woods and finds Garrett (voiced by Cary Elwes), a blind former resident of Camelot who knows his way around the woods, and together they encounter a two-headed dragon, named Devon and Cornwall, who ends up breaking the dragon code and helping them out.
This was a Warner Bros. picture, but it suffered from some of the same problems as your average Disney picture - too many animal sidekicks, and too much slapstick (funny characters fall down!) The story's OK, I suppose, but it got a little preachy with the lessons (see, if we all just work together, we can do it!).
But hey, there was some Irish-style music in here, with some songs by the Corrs, so I'll take that as a win for St. Patrick's Day.
Also starring the voices of Pierce Brosnan, Jane Seymour, Eric Idle, Don Rickles, Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "Lionheart"...shudder...), Sir John Gielgud (last seen in "First Knight"), Bronson Pinchot and Jaleel White.
RATING: 4 out of 10 chickens
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