Review: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

King Uther (Eric Bana) is betrayed by his own brother Vortigern (Jude Law), who kills him and his wife, and usurps the throne. Thankfully, Uther’s baby son Arthur is whisked away to safety. Raised in a brothel as an orphan, Arthur (played as an adult by Charlie Hunnam) is lured out of hiding by Vortigern through the ruse of drawing the magical sword Excalibur from the stone. Once revealed, Arthur is promptly imprisoned. He is eventually aided by a small band of rebels hoping to bring down Vortigen. Led by Sir Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou) they also include the slippery long-bowman Goosefat Bill (Aidan Gillen) and a female mage (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) among others. Geoff Bell plays a nasty henchman, whilst Michael McElhatton and soccer star David Beckham also have small roles.

American filmmaker Antoine Fuqua already gave us a Guy Ritchie-esque cockney boofhead “King Arthur” movie, but Guy Ritchie (“Revolver”, “Sherlock Holmes”, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) himself has a crack at it with this 2017 film. Even more so than the 2004 film, this one’s…not for me. From the very beginning I knew I was in trouble, with tiny, rapidly disappearing opening text leaving me somewhat clueless at the outset. The film might’ve gotten clearer, but it certainly doesn’t get any better with Ritchie blending his own cockney bullshit sensibilities with a wannabe Zack Snyder saturation of style when all that is really required is simple, solid storytelling. Yeah, that doesn’t exist in this dojo, I’m afraid.

The whole prologue with Eric Bana’s Uther Pendragon and setting up Jude Law’s treachery and villainy is uber-choppy. I get that the film is about King Arthur and not Uther, but the film doesn’t really work as a film about King Arthur really, and it’s no excuse for choppy storytelling anyway. Telling the story in hurried, MTV-edited fashion is a disaster. Who the hell are most of these people? We don’t know ‘coz Ritchie’s holding down the fast-forward button for the first half of the film, and after that it’s too late to care. And no, it’s not an ‘Impressionistic approach’ to storytelling, it’s shithouse storytelling. For at least the first quarter of the film, Ritchie doesn’t slow down long enough to tell a story, and in the second half he goes to the ‘Guy Ritchie hipster talky montage explaining events’ well far too many times. Why is that trope (best suited to tongue-in-cheek gangster and heist films) even in a film like this? Because Guy Ritchie is a lazy-arse storyteller who has no business making films set outside of modern day England. Yeah, he managed to get away with it for the most part in the first “Sherlock Holmes” movie, but he falls completely head over arse this time. Seriously, we get that same basic Guy Ritchie scene at least 5 times in a film where it doesn’t remotely fit in once here. When we actually do get some character and storytelling, it’s crap storytelling. Ritchie and his co-writers Joby Harold and Lionel Wigram (the latter having worked on “Sherlock Holmes” and the also rather watchable “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) have given us an idiotic rewrite of Arthur and his knights as underground rebels fighting an evil king.

Charlie Hunnam isn’t awful, but as directed by Ritchie he plays Arthur as a cockney scallywag Guy Ritchie character with a touch of Oliver Twist. It’s just wrong. Meanwhile, David Beckham’s performance is far from appalling, it’s just appalling that he’s even in this at all. Astrid Berges-Frisbey is absolutely terrible as a ‘mage’ in a film that needs wizards or magicians, not this video game-derived ‘mage’ bullshit (Not to mention that the film has –mostly- eliminated Merlin in order to combine a mage character with Guinevere, who isn’t mentioned by name here). Jude Law is quite well-cast as the treacherous Vortigern, but he looks so bored with the whole thing that his casting doesn’t end up amounting to much. He has his moments, but can’t really do anything with a clichéd character, even if it’s appropriate casting. Eric Bana, a well-cast Geoff Bell, and “Game of Thrones” Michael McElhatton are all pretty underused, unfortunately. Fellow “Game of Thrones” actor Aidan Gillen doesn’t get a character as rich and interesting as Lord Baelish (my favourite character on the show), but he at least kept me awake during his scenes because he’s an interesting actor. Djimon Hounsou probably fares best, and after about 55 minutes he goes all Basil Exposition on us and actually fills us in on a thing or two that is actually going on here. So very, very helpful…except it’s about 30 minutes too late. By then I had mentally checked out.

A weird misfire, it’s both underdone and incoherent yet overlong and slow. Composer Daniel Pemberton (“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) also needs to be reprimanded for his truly bizarre, jarring, and overly insistent music score throughout. There’s even techno elements to it, for crying out loud. You sir, are a poor man’s Hans Zimmer and have delivered 2017’s worst music score. No, I hated this damn thing. It’s choppy to the point of being borderline incoherent, and while being different is all well and good, what’s the point in changing everything so much that you can barely recognise the damn thing as a King Arthur film at all? If you’re gonna do it differently, first make sure you’ve done it well and interesting. A classic case of the wrong filmmaker for the gig. Some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in years, too. Lousy film. Oh when, oh when will we get a genuinely great King Arthur film? Monty Python strangely enough have come closest to the mark (No, I don’t like “Excalibur”).

Rating: D