King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Every so often, Hollywood decides to try another King Arthur adaptation, and it seems like they just keep getting worse, because this is one of the most grandly, flagrantly bad versions I have ever seen. Oh, I am sure there have been worse ones, since the Arthurian legends have been done so many times, but how often does a movie studio decide to launch $175+ million at a project so completely misguided? A movie where every narrative decision prompts another chorus of what were they thinking?

Ever since he married Madonna, Guy Ritchie has been making questionable decisions, but a run of success with his Sherlock Holmes movies got some people thinking he was a great director, despite there being little evidence that he is anything but a competent cinematographer. Anyway, apparently 3 or 4 King Arthur scripts were Frankensteined together to make this horror, and it shows in the almost complete lack of any kind of tonal consistency. This is a movie that doesn’t know whether it is a high fantasy, a gritty crime thriller, a political allegory, or a jaunty action-adventure, instead just deciding to shift gears whenever it feels like it.

The problem with shoehorning the Arthurian tale into one movie is that the real villain is Mordred, who is Arthur’s son and thus shows up way too late to serve as a foil for an origin story. This movie “solves” the problem by making the bad guy Uther’s evil brother Vortigern, who is played by Jude Law doing his oily, charming villain thing. He does a good job with the role, but Vortigern is so obviously evil and treacherous that it makes Uther (Eric Bana in a part so small it’s basically a cameo) look like a complete idiot for trusting him even a little bit.

The opening of the movie sets the stage by showing what the whole rest of the movie will be like: it looks awesome, it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s about as Arthurian as World of Warcraft. Less, maybe. The prologue explains how humans “lived in peace” with “the Mages” until the “Mage Sorcerer King Mordred” started some shit. And so you get a massive assault on Camelot by elephants that make the Oliphants from Return of the King look like pygmies. They come shambling in, entire fortresses on their backs, crushing everything in their path. It looks freaking amazing, but it is such a complete butchery of the legends as well as anything resembling history, that I am not sure what it is supposed to accomplish.

It gets even crazier from there, with Vortigern sacrificing his wife to a trio of tentacled siren/witches (who are never explained) that live in pools under Camelot (also never explained) and they help him overthrow Uther by turning him into a towering, armored, Grim Reaper dude who looks almost exactly like Frazetta’s Death Dealer and wields a ridiculous double-ended scythe. He kills Uther and Igraine, and little Arthur floats down what is apparently supposed to be the Thames to “Londinium”, where he is taken in and raised by whores in a bordello.

If you already have a lot of questions, well, neither I nor the movie have much in the way of answers for you. Part of the problem reviewing this movie is the fact that it would take a 10,000-word essay to unpack all of the stupid shit going on here. Do I talk about how Uther, before dying, throws Excalibur in the air and lets it impale him, and then he turns to stone and sinks to the bottom of the lake? Do I discuss how we keep talking about “Mages” as a separate race, despite that having no correspondence in the legends? Do we talk about how Arthur learns to fight from an Asian guy who has a martial arts dojo in “Londinium” and that said guy is called “Kung Fu George”?

It’s just so painful, the moreso because the cast is generally pretty good, and the movie is filled with images and scenes that actually work and have some resonance to them. The problem is that most of the scenes don’t seem to have much to do with each other, and so they don’t build to make something greater, they just pass by and are over and then something completely different starts. There are too many elements that go nowhere or are so bizarre they need explanations which never come. Ritchie makes some good sequences, but he can’t make this mess into something coherent, and he doesn’t seem interested in trying.

And this movie is a complete failure as an adaptation because it shows no desire to respect the myths it is supposed to be based on. The characters from the legends are nothing like their onscreen counterparts, and there is no attempt to make this feel like an Arthurian piece, rather they just slap a bunch of names on things and call it done. If this had been a fantasy unconnected to anything, it would actually have been better, because it has some cool elements and ideas, but they needed developing. This could have made a fine Sword & Sorcery movie if the creators had been able to make up their minds about what the hell they were trying to do, and cut out all the extraneous shit that didn’t need to be there. The only consolation in the whole mess is that the idiots who screwed it up lost a shit-ton of money, and the five planned sequels will thankfully never be made.