King Arthur (DVD) > Reviews > De-mystified Monotony

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Indifferent to it
Story	Very ordinary
Characters / Performances	Weak
Special Effects	Good
Soundtrack	Good

Advantages:	Some good special effects and score
Disadvantages:	Cringe - worthy perfomances and laughable script, no mystery

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

There were two reasons, primarily, why I was awaiting the release of King Arthur with anticipation.
One, I greatly enjoyed last summer's blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean, also produced by über-action producer Jerry Bruckheimer and had high hopes for King Arthur being cut from the same cloth.
Two, the legendary stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have always held a sort of romantic mysticism for me and I was eager to see what a big-screen adaptation of these stories could mean for the legend.

Unfortunately, I was sadly disappointed.

The film starts with a voice-over from Lancelot (Hornblower's Ioan Gruffudd, struggling to keep the Welsh accent in check) talking about how the Romans, on defeating the brave Sarmatian knights, were so impressed with their valour, they let them go with their lives if they, and their children and their children's children (etc) would serve the Roman army.
Lancelot is one such knight, torn from his home during puberty to serve fifteen years under the command of the Roman commander Artorius, or Arthur.
The movie then cuts to fifteen years later, where Arthur (Clive Owen in an embarrassingly weak performance) is leading his six knights home, where they will be given their freedom ('I'm gonna drink 'til I can't piss straight' says Ray Winstone's bemusingly cockney-accented Bors).
Unfortunately, Bishop Germanius (Ivano Marescotti) demands that the Knights go on one last mission before they are granted freedom and safe passage home - to rescue future-pope Alecto (Lorenzo De Angelis) from where he is about to be besieged by the vicious and merciless Saxons, lead by Stellan Skarsgård's Cerdic.
At Alecto's father's castle, they find a number of pagan Woads starving in the dungeons where they have been locked away for not having Christian beliefs. Among them is the spirited Guinevere (Keira Knightley) a Woad who wishes for Arthur to join with her people, lead by Merlin (Stephen Dillane), lifelong enemies of both the Saxons and the Romans, to fight the Saxons.
The Knights set off back to Hadrian's wall, pursued by the Saxons, hungry for blood.

This film has been billed as a 'de-mystified take on the legend of King Arthur'. Unfortunately, much of the beauty of the legends, which has been lost in this version, is the mystery. Arthur is now half-Roman, half-Briton, but fighting for the Romans against the Britons, fighting, we are told again and again, for 'freedom'. Yet how free are dead Britons?
Also, the Round Table is supposedly so that 'all men are equal'. However probably Arthur's servant should have added 'but some are more equal than others' seeing as his master had just spent half an hour hacking his own people to pieces.
The sword in the stone has been changed to a sword Arthur pulls out of his father's grave, and the legendary Excalibur is watered down to just a couple of weak mentions.
The love-triangle between Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere where, as I understood it, Arthur went away and left his bride with Lancelot and came back to find that they had been playing away, is almost totally gone. Left is a few lasting looks between the three of them, before Guinevere seemingly decides that Arthur is a better bet.

All these things combined make the plot very poor bearing in mind the exciting and beautiful stories from which it stemmed.
The dialogue, however, is worse. Script writer David Franzoni has chosen lots of boringly serious 'message' speeches (sample: 'I will die in battle, of that I'm certain. But hopefully a battle of my choosing. But if it be this one, grant me a favour. Don't bury me in our sad little cemetery, burn me. Burn me and cast my ashes to a strong east wind.' Says Lancelot, looking away into the distance meaningfully) scattered with a bit of embarrassingly flat humour ('I love all my bastards! Especially number three! He's a good fighter!' Says Bors. Lancelot retorts 'That's because he's mine).
Lacking from the script is the knowing humour and subtle in-jokes that made Pirates of the Caribbean such a big hit. King Arthur doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a serious movie with a message, or a humorous Monty Python-esque take on the legends.

Worse than the script, if that is possible, is the acting. I don't think I have ever seen a film with such uniformly bad acting (except, possibly, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).
Owen, as Arthur, is oddly lacking in passion and heart for a leading role, and just appears dull and weak.
Knightley's Guinevere is a spirited heroine, but she is not really given enough to work with and comes off by turns cold and calculating and passionate and brave and in love. Neither side of her character is developed enough to make it interesting and she just ends up like a mardy teenager.
Gruffudd is, if that's possible, worse than Owen. Lancelot is supposed to be a sort of womanising lady's man ('When are you going to leave Bors and come to me?', 'If Gawain's wife is a beautiful as he says she is, I shall be spending a lot of time at Gawain's house') but plays more like a Welsh toff making a pitiful stab at the English accent. Even during his impassioned 'serious' speeches, Gruffudd just looks like he wants to laugh.
The other Knights, Gawain (a semi-promising, in the right role, Joel Edgerton), Galahad (the adorable Hugh Dancy), Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen), and Dagonet (Ray Stephenson) and the Saxon King and Prince (Skarsgård and Til Schweiger) might have been interesting characters, but they are badly underdeveloped and their lack of real defining qualities makes them hard to care about.
By far the worst piece of acting, and casting, has to be Ray Winstone as the rough-nut-with-a-heart Bors. The other Knights are all quite posh English boys who 'don't kill for pleasure', whom you can imagine strolling laughing through the corridors of Eton or Harrow fifteen years ago saying things like 'Golly gosh'. Strangely, however, Bors seems to have wandered in off the set of Eastenders where he was filling in for Minty. Winstone's character tries, and fails, to inject some much-needed humour into the script, by randomly saying things like 'I'm going for a piss', 'I'm so big down there, its like a baby's arm holding an apple' while the other Knights josh around making speeches about honour and freedom. The mind boggles.

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) opts for close-ups shots on people's faces while they make said speeches, and, apart from this, baring in mind that he didn't write the script, you can't really blame him for the awfulness of the film. A better director might have been able to extract better performances, but it is doubtful.
The special effects, particularly in the battle scenes, are good, but not outstanding, and in today's CGI-mad world, is this so amazing?
The soundtrack, consisting of wailing death music also favoured by such films as Troy or Lord of the Rings, and dah-dah-da-da battle scores, is quite good, though nowhere near as good as, say, LOTR.

All in all, despite some good points, King Arthur fails spectacularly on many levels. Trying to be an epic Gladiator-style movie, it instead flounders as a semi-entertaining action flick with some terrible performances.