BEFORE: Still stuck at home, yesterday I finished typing up a script for one boss, but that's about all I can do from home - tomorrow I may need to venture into Manhattan just to calculate payroll checks, because that's where all my paperwork is. I passed the rest of the day yesterday with "Grand Theft Auto 3", I haven't played any GTA videogames since 2016, because I never have the time. But in times of crisis we tend to go back to the familiar - I was running ambulance missions until this morning, pretending that I was delivering people infected with corona virus to the hospital.
Genevieve O'Reilly carries over from "Tolkien". Another thing that I can do while I'm stuck at home is go through my "Star Wars" autograph collection - Genevieve O'Reilly appeared in "Rogue One" as the young Mon Mothma, a role that Caroline Blakiston made famous in "Return of the Jedi". I have Blakiston's autograph in my collection, but not O'Reilly's, so maybe I'll take a quick look for it on the autograph sites I frequent.
THE PLOT: A band of kids embark on an epic quest to thwart a medieval menace.
AFTER: The central character here is a regular kid, who goes to a regular British school, not the prep school seen last night in "Tolkien" - of course, last night's film was set back in the early 1900's, when British prep schools were boys-only, and every proper young man was being groomed to be either a writer, poet, composer or dead in World War I. OK, so the career choices maybe weren't very good back then. Great news, times have changed and I've learned now that the U.K. school system accepts both girls AND people of color, and they're also finally teaching that the Earth is not at the center of the universe.
More great news, this film has all the great special effects that "Tolkien" didn't have, there are wizards and demonic knights and a dragon-like sorceress - if you want to pretend this has Gandalf and Nazgul ring-wraiths and Smaug, I won't fault you a bit. I know that I was sorely missing that stuff last night, so this film really stepped up and fulfilled the requirement.
Also, I have to champion the depiction of school bullying here, and the proper way to react to it - nearly. Alex saves his best friend, Bedders, from being bullied by Lance and Kaye (yes, girls of color can be bullies, too, I guess that's progress?) and he gets in trouble for fighting. But he doesn't tell the truth about who started it, because that's snitching, and that just gets the bullied kid a bigger beating somewhere down the road. Instead he shows the bullies that there's a bigger threat (here it's a demonic one, but this is a special case) and conscripts them into knighthood, forcing them to follow the code of chivalry and follow him as their leader. This is what I've always been saying about bullies - you can't fight them, and you can't snitch on them, but there are more clever ways to deal with them, and it's up to the bullied people to figure that out. Pay them off, befriend them, get them professional help, every case is different, maybe there are no simple answers and every bully is a puzzle to solve. But "Be Best" and "Stop Bullying" are just useless phrases.
Instead, it's all hands on deck after Alex finds Excalibur at a building site - apparently a construction crew unearthed it, thought, "Wow, what an amazing discovery, a medieval sword stuck in a stone, with a Latin inscription and...whoa, it's 5 o'clock, time to punch out, let's just leave this magical, impressive, cool-looking sword exposed here and read these words tomorrow at 9 am sharp, OK?" Come on... But this apparently re-awakens the ancient evil of Morgana, and also the sorcerer Merlin. Alex's sword makes him the focal point of the action, because Morgana's Mortes Milles knights can track him down every night, and pull him out of reality while they try to kill him (so he very inconveniently can't get any help from the authorities, or any adults, only the people who he's knighted with the sword). Alex and his knights have four days to travel across England via henges (ah, finally they have a purpose, those henges) before the solar eclipse, when Morgana can return in person and...umm, kill everyone? Enslave all humans? It's a bit unclear.
If only the film could have been a little more bold in its storytelling - it kind of feels like somebody just couldn't pick a path and stick with it. Casting Patrick Stewart as Merlin? That's a bold choice. But they also wanted to pick up on that thread from films past (like "Camelot") that suggested that Merlin ages backwards in time, so 80% of the time, Merlin was played by a teenager - that's another bold choice, but unfortunately it contradicts the previous bold casting choice. So unfortunately, in this case, they should have picked only one of these to resolve the conflict - but they didn't, so Merlin switches from old to young at random times, which is predicated by the most random thing they could think of, which was to have the character sneeze, thus we get a great, powerful wizard who's constantly losing control because he's allergic to something? It feels a bit like there were too many cooks in the narrative kitchen, and that spoiled the broth.
(Look, I'll allow this if it turns out that Patrick Stewart wasn't in good health, or was only available for a couple of days due to a scheduling conflict, like if you're lucky enough to get Patrick Stewart for two days, you should probably sign him for those two days, and work around it - like, your story's going to be a mess, you hey, you got yourself a great actor there. But then, please, make sure his appearance makes some kind of sense!)
Another example - previous King Arthur films have stated that Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, therefore the rightful king of England. But then if he's the king's son, there's no need for the "Sword in the Stone" (the stand-in for ritual trial by combat to prove worthiness). Some other King Arthur films therefore had to bend over backwards to get all the story elements in there - he's the son of Uther, only Uther didn't know he had a son, so he's the rightful heir by blood, and also he's lost and the sword in the stone is an ultra-convenient way for him to prove who he is, before the age of DNA testing. "The Kid Who Would Be King" takes things a step further, because Alex has to pull the sword from the stone, which suggests he has royal blood, then he goes on a quest to find his father, but the film also can't disrespect Queen Elizabeth and a thousand years of royal succession, so somehow he both deserves to be king and also DOESN'T get to be king, so here again, the story seems to be in conflict with itself, and issues like this therefore just don't get resolved.
Kids and teens probably aren't going to notice these things or at least not care about them, if they get caught up in the spirit of adventure or distracted by all the special effects and cool monsters and stuff. And this never really set out to be a serious film in the swords and sorcery genre anyway, but still, I'm bothered by a few obvious story problems.
Also starring Louis Ashbourne Serkis (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Dean Chaumoo, Tom Taylor, Rhianna Dorris, Patrick Stewart (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Angus Imrie, Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "The Snowman"), Denise Gough, Noma Dumezweni (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Mark Bonnar, Alexandra Roach (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Nick Mohammed, Adam Buxton (last heard in "Sing").
RATING: 6 out of 10 buckets of fried chicken
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