BEFORE: OK, after watching my final documentary for 2019, it's time for the final King Arthur film, out of four for the year. The topic has spanned four decades, too with the 1960's musical "Camelot", the 1950's "Knights of the Round Table", and the 2004 "King Arthur" - each movie probably saying more about the time it was produced than it did about the time period it depicted. And so we come to 2017's "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword", which will no doubt do the same. I look forward to seeing Arthur and Guinevere portrayed as two young hipsters who meet while squatting in a Soho apartment, with Merlin serving as the wise but mysterious building manager.
Jude Law carries over from "Exit Through the Gift Shop" - I doubt when he went to see Banksy's exhibition in L.A. that his action would play a part in someone in NYC linking films together 10 years later...
FOLLOW-UP TO: "King Arthur" (2004) (Movie #3,321)
THE PLOT: Robbed of his birthright, Arthur comes up the hard way in the back alleys of the city. But once he pulls the sword from the stone, he is forced to acknowledge his true legacy - whether he likes it or not.
AFTER: Well, I was partially correct. This version of the King Arthur tale ended up borrowing story elements liberally from franchises such as "Harry Potter", "Fantastic Beasts" and "The Lord of the Rings", and then Frankenstein-grafting those on to the familiar Arthurian legend. Then of course with all the thick Cockney accents, the street-fighting and the running around and evading the king's men, parts of this ended up feeling like "Snatch" or maybe "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels".
Right from the first battle, you can get the sense that this film just doesn't want to be taken seriously. Mordred is attacking Camelot, and he's got an army of elephants that are each impossibly large, like mountain-sized, larger than the castle, and each has a wooden building on its back. WTF? For that matter, how is Mordred fighting the forces of Uther, when Mordred is (in some versions of the story, at least) Uther's grandson? And Arthur isn't old enough to have a kid at this point. Did Mordred live backwards through time, like Merlin did in "Camelot"?
But this is really a stripped-down version of the King Arthur story - there's no Lancelot, no Guinevere, and Merlin's only in here for a minute or so. There aren't even any Knights of the Round Table, though the table makes a cameo appearance near the end. I guess since this was supposed to be the first in a series of 6 films, they were saving all of that stuff for the five sequels - but this film stunk so bad at the box office that those will never get made now. (However, if they HAD made a sequel, there's a good chance that the female Mage here, who functions as a stand-in for Merlin, could have been revealed to be named Guinevere - the 2004 "King Arthur" film also sort of moved in this direction, making Keira Knightley's character one of the forest people who worked closely with Merlin.)
What they added here was Vortigern, who's never been part of the King Arthur story before, not to my knowledge anyway, and they grafted him into the story by making him King Uther Pendragon's brother, who usurps the throne when he realizes that the rules are going to make Uther's son king before he gets a shot at it - so Vortigern teams up with Mordred, and even after Mordred is defeated, Vortigern still goes after Uther to become king. This leads to Arthur being set adrift in a boat, which seems like a nod to the Moses story, only he's found and adopted by whores instead of Pharaoh's wife.
As silly as this seems, it does feel like a valid work-around for the conundrum I referred to after watching the other King Arthur movies earlier this year - if Arthur is Uther's son, why doesn't he inherit the throne, and why then does he have to draw the sword out of the stone, to prove who he is? Either the crown should be inherited, or won by trial, but in the Arthurian legend we seem to have a combination of both. By making Arthur unaware of his own identity as the heir to the throne, and growing up anonymously on the rough streets of Londinium, this explains why he has to pull Excalibur from the stone - so that this will prove who he is, even to himself.
However, it's very stupid that Vortigern takes every single man of a certain age who MIGHT be Arthur on a boat trip to where the sword Excalibur is stuck in the stone, and his men force each potential heir to the throne to try to pull the sword out. Good god, why? I mean, sure, if there was a prophecy that the true son of Uther would someday return, maybe he'd want to find out who that was as soon as possible, but he's hastening his own demise this way. Wouldn't it be smarter to leave Arthur alone in blissful ignorance of his own heritage, for as long as he could? The prophecy doesn't say WHEN Arthur would return to claim the throne, so why help him along, why not delay that? This is just sloppy, sloppy writing.
Then everything sort of gets turned into a montage - the simplest transactions can't take place without interweaving them with another scene happening somewhere or someWHEN else. OK, Arthur goes to the Darklands to learn how to use Excalibur and prepare for the upcoming battle, so cue the "Rocky"-style training montage as he battles giant bats and Rodents of Unusual Size. That's all well and good, but then even simple conversations get the "montage-y" treatment, and that's just not necessary. Pile on flashback after flashback of Arthur watching his mother and father die again and again (they might as well have been shot in an alley by the Joker) and after a while, it's hard to follow what's happening here. I lost track of it several times, there are just too many irons in the fire and too much jumping around.
And then once everything gets all worked out, somehow these street-fighting men become the Knights of the Round Table, suddenly forced to learn the rules of chivalry? Yeah, I'm not buying it. Plus they're all so conveniently multi-culti, like there's a black guy and an Asian guy and that just seems like pandering to me. Come on, there were no knights of color in the Middle Ages, no medieval affirmative action plan, and we all know it - this feels very hard to believe and insincere. Despite a few clever work-arounds that added to the story, this movie still came off overall as a big jumbled mess.
On top of all THAT, it occurs to me that by putting all the magic power into the sword Excalibur, it leads to the question concerning - what does Arthur actually DO? OK, so he trains, but he faints nearly every time he picks up the sword, because he's confronted with another flashback. And when he finally figures out how to use it to take down an army all at once, it feels like the sword is doing all the heavy lifting, and he's just holding it. Who wants to root for the sword, that's like cheering for Batman's gadgets instead of the hero himself.
And be warned, Vortigern gains his power by making deals with dark forces, who take the form of a weird octopus-like creature that lives under the castle and sometimes looks like sexy women. Yeah, I'm creeped out by that. So in addition to "Lord of the Rings", "Harry Potter" and the Bible, there's some Lovecraftian nightmare fuel in here as well. I didn't schedule a 9/11 tie-in, but at the end of this film, when the villain is defeated (whoops, sorry, spoiler alert), his big magical tower comes crashing down. Coincidence?
Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Astrid Berges-Frisbey (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"), Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Eric Bana (last seen in "Hanna"), Aidan Gillen (last seen in "Sing Street"), Freddie Fox (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Craig McGinlay, Tom Wu (last seen in "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), Kingsley Ben-Adir (last seen in "The Commuter"), Neil Maskell (last seen in "The Mummy"), Annabelle Wallis (last seen in "W.E."), Katie McGrath (ditto), Geoff Bell (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Poppy Delevingne (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Millie Brady (last seen in "Legend"), Wil Coban, Bleu Landau, Jacqui Ainsley, Georgina Campbell, Rob Knighton, Michael Hadley (last seen in "The Invisible Woman"), Peter Ferdinando (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Michael McElhatton (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife'), Mikael Persbrandt (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Lorraine Bruce, Eline Powell, Hermione Corfield (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), Philip Ball, Kamil Lemieszewski, with cameos from David Beckham (last seen in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."), Guy Ritchie.
RATING: 3 out of 10 exploding arrows (again? What is this, "Robin Hood" from 2018?)
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