King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

The elephant in the room is... well, there are lots of elephants in the room; let's be honest.

Before I expound further, let me say this: if you like the movie's trailers, like a fair bit of action but don't particularly care about how every bit of it fits into a story, don't particularly care about the traditional legend(s) of King Arthur, like a bunch of fantasy mixed in, and plenty of (now run-of-the-mill) CGI, you might like this movie. Reading further may unnecessarily dissuade you from watching it.

Of course, if you've seen the trailers, you know that there really are (ridiculously large, CGI) elephants in the film. The other, proverbial, elephants in the room are how far the movie strays from the legendary King Arthur story.

Now, in fairness, legends (King Arthur, in this case) being what they are, it is difficult to know where reality ends and fantasy begins. Nonetheless, even though the legend has changed somewhat over the years (as legends are wont to do), this movie bears little resemblance to the story that moviegoers familiar with Arthur will expect.

Merlin? Rendered unimportant and replaced by a (gender-PC?) beautiful female mage, who remains nameless. (I suppose the lack of a name was supposed to lend some air of irresistible mystery to her. It failed, miserably.) (sigh)

Bedivere, the handsomest of Arthur's knights (almost in the entire land), one-handed, he of the muscular build? Well, at least he had the build. Some, including Bedivere, were obviously cast in a fit of PC multiculturalism. Please. Save it for where it makes sense.

Guinevere? Lancelot? Missing. David Beckham managed to land a spot, though. Go figure.

I read Ritchie's bio here on IMDb. It's stated there that Ritchie thought film school graduates made "boring and unwatchable" films. His disdain for the work of others seems to go beyond those who've studied film art. Huh. That doesn't stop Ritchie from leaning on the creations of others to sell a flick.

Ritchie has a flashy -- often manic -- presentation style. I'll give him some benefit of doubt in presuming that he does so in an effort to create a sense of action. Unfortunately, it often serves more to make stories incoherent.

In watching Richie's Sherlock Holmes re-imaginings, I couldn't shake a feeling of Ritchie's lack of respect for Doyles' Holmes. I get the same sense of lack of respect for traditional tales of King Arthur.

I could go on and on, picking the film apart, but all of it boils down to the simple appearance that Ritchie is simply capitalizing on the popularity of someone else' story -- King Arthur and the legend of Excalibur -- by using the name in the title, then remaking the entire story to suit a flight of his fancy.

Ritchie might as well have just left the sword out of the story and dropped the name of Arthur from the story -- and title. Then he could have gone anywhere he wanted with the story without disappointing moviegoers drawn in by the title. It might have stood on its own as a fair (by no means great) action/fantasy film. As a retelling of the King Arthur legend, it is a disappointment.

On second thought, considering Richie sold the idea to the movie studio as King-Arthur-meets-The-Lord-of-the-Rings, perhaps he should have just named the movie accordingly. Then the Tolkien influence (and the use of Tolkien's oliphants) would make much more sense. Then, too, moviegoers would know better than to expect a movie simply about the King Arthur legend, which the current title implies.

This Movie was so much better than everybody told me. The fight scenes, the shots and the music was gorgeous. I really don't now why this movie receives that much hate. For me it was just Guy Ritchie at his best. Give this movie a try, its worth it! No joke, it was the best movie in this year, just stunning and epic. I loved it and i think that a lot of people will love this movie too! 7/10.

This is Guy Ritchie all day long. Guy doesn't do subtle. What he does do, is more often or not, deliver a visually entertaining feast for the eyes sprinkled with action and humour.

Charlie Hunnam was an interesting choice for Arthur. I became a fan of his during Sons of Anarchy but some of his other work has been a little hit and miss. Initially I wasn't enjoying him but as the film moved forward I took to his portrayal of the character.

For me Excalibur is the bench mark telling of this tale in film, David Gemmel has a series of novels that offer a great version of the story as well. The point being is that this movie has a lot to compete with and to be fair it does a pretty good job, its lots of fun :)

Let's be clear: this contains very few aspects of the actual Arthur legend. They probably should have just gone for a wacky original medieval fantasy film instead. That being said, I didn't expect Ritchie's style to work this well here. And he hasn't been this crazy since Snatch. Some montages are so breathless, fast and innovative as far as editing and soundtrack go, it's a pleasure. Sure, the plot follows the genre conventions more or less, and the finale is a bit heavy on CGI. On the other hand the assassination attempt sequence is fantastic and the portrayal of magic pretty cool. Hell, I had fun with this.

*Minor Spoilers Ahead* The movie beings at the start of a big battle. The Mage army is smashing through King Uther's defences. Uther (Eric Bana) decides to take the battle into his own hands, despite his brother Vortigern's (Jude Law) reservations. Uther jumps onto the leading war elephant and slays the Mage king, ending the battle. After the battle, there are conflicting arguments on how to deal with the fallout. Previously the feuding kingdoms lived in harmony so some of Uther's generals: Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou) and Bill (Aidan Gillen) want to seek peace while Vortigern proposes hunting down the Mages and killing them. Uther agrees that a temporary peace should be reached and while some leave the meeting happy, others are angry and will not back down. Uther senses this and packs up his wife and his son Arthur (later played by Charlie Hunnam) to leave the castle at night.

If you've looked at the reviews for this movie, they're really scathing. I would never argue that this movie is a complete success but critics have been too quick to slam this movie. There's some really good stuff in here. I tend to like most of Guy Ritchie's movies and one of the biggest reasons is that his characters have tons of camaraderie. This is often helped by some stellar dialogue too. They make you laugh but it also helps you believe in the relationships between the characters. That was the strongest part of King Arthur for me. My favourite scenes weren't the big action set pieces, they were the parts where Arthur and his crew were taking care of business in Londinium or sabotaging the villain's operation. Other than the occasional slip up with modern day phrasing (I don't think anyone said razzle-dazzle in the medieval ages?) it reminded me of Jason Statham's dialogue in Snatch. It was generally solid and I laughed throughout the movie.

Guy Ritchie has been at this long enough that he's developed his own way doing action. In some of his projects it works great (Sherlock Holmes has some really great action scenes) and in other projects it doesn't. I thought the actions scenes in Legend of the Sword were good in some areas and they weren't so great in others. I saw this with a friend and she said the action reminded her of video games. She's not wrong. When Arthur uses Excalibur, its like unlocking a special ability in a video game. The CGI is decent (it better be with a $175 million budget) but the movie also can't seem to decide how far into fantasy it wants to go. So the action is a mixed bag, the ending goes too crazy but it didn't affect the overall grade too much.

The acting is also pretty mixed. I actually really liked Charlie Hunnam as Arthur. He's had a tough road transitioning to movies but he had the charisma and the right physicality to pull this role off. I also really liked some of the actors in supporting parts: Aiden Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, Neil Maskell and Kingsley Ben-Adir are all respectively funny and they were believable as a crew. Getting into some of the performances I didn't like as much, I don't want to blame Jude Law because he was trying but Vortigern was a lacklustre character for me. I also thought Astrid Bergès-Frisbey was weak. Her character seemed like something that could have been cut out and she was really wooden as The Mage.

This movie reminds me of 2 other Warner Bros. releases from last year that had a mixed measure of success; The Legend of Tarzan and Suicide Squad. Both of those movie were completely trashed by critics and were flawed products. But they also had some really cool parts and strong aspects that people just threw aside when judging the movie. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword falls into that category for me. The action is mixed, the acting is mixed and the story takes some pretty big liberties from the King Arthur legend and the historical period. But you have some great dialogue, interesting characters, a decent leading performance and some big action set pieces that are impressive. This wasn't the train wreck that I expected and if you're interested in seeing this, don't be afraid to give it a shot. I would be closer to a 6.5/10 but I'll round up to a 7/10.