King Arthur

‘king Arthur the money men must be calling it. Hotly anticipated, with the screenwriter of Gladiator, the director that drove Denzel to Oscar glory and the producer who made more money than three studios put together last year. ‘king Arthur. They didn’t get what they signed up for.

Jerry Bruckheimer, the box office maestro turns his hand to one of the oldest of English legends and comes up with…a mess.

It’s not as bad as everyone says, but it’s certainly not as good as Braveheart/Gladiator which it seems to be striving for. Nor does it reach the level of fun that Pirates of the Caribbean reached, and more the pity for it because if there’s one thing this film lacks to make up for the lack of scale, it’s humour. There are touches, but it’s all too few and far between the constant close ups of people looking pi$$ed off.

The central cast is large, a merry band of seven brothers, but you never get a sense of any of them deep down. Yes there’s the dark brooding leader who has a problem with what to do after that ‘one last job’. There’s the big guy who shouts and drinks a lot for comic effect. There’s the silent cool guy with Japanese swords and a hawk on his arm. There’s the silent, brooding one in black with TWO swords. There’s another one that’s erm, silent and carries a sword. There’s a tall one with no hair to make him stand out from the others. There’s, er, there might be another one I can’t remember.

What confuses things is the secondary characters who crop up and are far more interesting, but seem to have 20 minutes each in the story before being forgotten about. The manipulative Italian Bishop – cool! But where did he go? The sinister Roman lord who bricks up locals and thinks he’s a God – cool! Oh, he’s gone. His son who’s destined to become Pope – wow, there’s mileage here...oh no there isn’t. The list goes on.

The one character that does come in and confuse the hell out of everything is Guinevere. The princess that forms a love triangle with Lancelot and Arthur, right? Er, wrong. She dips in and out with little effect (some of it due to Keira Knightley’s lacklustre performance) and you’re left wondering – eh? Clearly there’s a bigger script here, and it feels like they were going for a three hour epic to challenge the Oscars. What they got in the edit though was that mess I was telling you about, but a three hour mess. Best thing to do? Edit it down into a two hour movie, make sure the action set pieces stay in, lose the ‘boring’ character stuff and stick it out as a rollicking summer action movie.

The ‘bad guy’ is played with boredom by Stellan Skaarsgard who was probably still writhing in pain at having to make the Exorcist sequel twice. We don’t really get a sense of why he’s such a nasty piece of work. Sure he kills folk and burns homes, but then again every character in the film does that – why’s he so bad?!

There are some goodies amongst it all though, so it isn’t a total waste of time. Clive Owen occasionally dips into acting and proves he could possibly be quite good at it – just knock off the sullen voice and blank expression Clive! If you like arrows, then there’s plenty on display. Some of the fighting is a bit dull to watch – the drop frame rate from Gladiator is challenging The Matrix’s bullet time for overuse in Hollywood, but some scenes are suitably impressive.

The main problem is the script doesn’t know what it wants to be, and the direction is flat and forgets all the rules of directing ‘epic’. They had the budget, they had stars, they had source material – how did it all go wrong?