The Unseen Movie Review

King Arthur

You can just picture the Disney executives sitting around their big table, puffing on fat cigars bought with the piles of money they’ve been raking in since the success of last year’s Pirates of the Caribbean:

“Epics are doing well at the moment. There’s that Troy one, and Alexander, and that Hannibal flick about that dude with the elephants. People are loving this whole ancient Greece and Rome vibe after Gladiator, and that Lord of the Rings thing seemed to go down quite well too. So we need an epic with a mix of wizards and Romans. And that Keira Knightly chick from Pirates who everyone liked, but wearing fewer clothes this time.”

In swaggers Jerry Bruckheimer, the über-producer responsible for more summer blockbusters than pretty much anybody:

“Gentlemen,” he says, “King Arthur. It’s got instant name recognition, battles, wizards and a love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot for a bit of sexual tension and conflict between friends. We can even claim it’s ‘historically accurate’, set it in the fourth century A.D. and chuck in some Romans. Sorted. All bases covered.”

Everyone knows about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Fifteen hundred years after his first mention, books continue to be written about Arthur in their droves. There have been scores of films about Arthur and his knights, from the hilarious Monty Python and the Holy Grail through John Boorman’s arty Excalibur to the musical Camelot. The last Arthur film, the Richard Gere vehicle First Knight, did well at the box office despite being abject rubbish.

So why does this film feel a bit flat? Bruckheimer’s movies work best when they have a strong, wisecracking lead – Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, Sean Connery in The Rock, Will Smith in Bad Boys or Eddie Murphy in Beverley Hills Cop. When this seems like it won’t work, Bruckheimer always comes up with spectacle: supersonic dogfights in Top Gun, asteroids smashing into things in Armageddon, battleships exploding in Pearl Harbor, frenetic street battles in Black Hawk Down, semi-naked women in Coyote Ugly, or fast cars in Gone in Sixty Seconds and Days of Thunder.

This should be blockbuster by numbers. Get a handsome male lead who’s being hotly tipped as the next James Bond (Clive Owen), hire the guy who wrote Gladiator to tackle the script, make sure most of the cast are British with a few cult names like Ray Winstone and Ioan Gruffud to keep the critics interested, hire an actor with a slightly sinister European accent (Stallan Skarsgård) as the villain, and throw in loads of battles.

The problem lies in the “historical” premise. With an Arthur film you want knights in shining armour galloping magnificently into battle with lances raised across lush green fields, not leather-bound, blue-painted savages screaming as they bound through the mist and rain. You want Merlin the magician, not Merlin the moderately clever chap. You want lead actors who feel able to emote, not deliver all their lines in a monotone to highlight how serious everything is. Most importantly you want an Arthur who’s British, not a member of the Roman army.

But from a cinematic point of view there is a worse problem. King Arthur just doesn’t draw you in. There is no feeling of connection to the bewildering array of too-similar characters or the unfolding events. It lacks that x-factor which makes a great, entertaining film. It has no real heart.

Legend has it that King Arthur will one day return. This Arthur, sadly, is an impostor.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM