King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Regardless of how much of it he’s had in his lifetime, strange can sure make a good man do some odd things! Now clearly the word strange is a euphemism for something else, so if you don’t know what it is, feel free to go urban dictionary it. But just know that at one point strange had me eating beets and reading terrible Dan Brown novels, and at another point even had me flying halfway across the globe after it left me for another dude! Now that’s some true power right there! So it should come as no surprise that it can also kill a man’s career; just look at Guy Ritchie for example. When he first popped on the scene, he was making cool London based gangster films like Lock Stock and Snatch; but the second he met Madonna, it was all over for him! The next thing you know, he’s making one of the lowest rated films of all time while simultaneously convincing Jason Statham to put in hair extensions so that he could look like one of the rejects from Coldplay. Now that’s a clear sign that the Material Girl really knows how to work that gap in her teeth!

Well somehow, Ritchie caught lightning in a bottle when he made Sherlock Holmes and in the process revived his career, only to instantly ruin it again with Sherlock Holmes 2. But as is always the case in Hollywood, if you somehow stumble and bumble your way to a $300 million dollar film, they will constantly give you chance after chance to recreate that magic. Just look at Mel Gibson, the guy openly insulted every powerful man in Hollywood without ever apologizing for it, yet he somehow still makes films and gets to appear in front of a worldwide audience with his 23 year old hooker at the Oscars. Did you see the look on that poor girls face whenever the camera panned in on her? I swear you could see a thought bubble pop over her head with a caption that read "Man, I really hope my dealer Charlie picks up tonight! I don’t think two Xanax is going to cut it after all. Melly’s already on his second bottle and his third Viagra and it’s not even 9 o’clock yet!"

So in his latest effort to stay relevant, Ritchie decided to take his shot at telling the legendary tale of King Arthur. And in doing so, I guess he realized what I did when he first started the project; that remarkably, no one has ever been able to properly produce a decent Excalibur film even with all of the advanced technology we have available to us today. So what does he decide to do? Well he decides to try and turn it into a London based gangster film of course! But hey, you can’t knock a man for sticking to his guns.

Now I’m not going to insult your intelligence by summarizing the tale of King Arthur because even the dumbest hick out there knows that he was the only one who could pull the legendary sword out of the stone; making him the rightful ruler of Great Britain. But what makes this film so different is that it only briefly mentions Merlin the wizard and instead decides to put more of its focus on the other mystical creatures (Mages) and their powers; which could have led to some unbelievably fresh scenes but I’ll speak more about that here in a bit.

And while Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) has excellent fighting skills and a tough guy attitude, all of which he picked up from being raised in a brothel, which for some reason had its own version of Mr. Miyagi in it; he still must learn how to control the power of Excalibur if he is ever to overcome the rule of the evil and power hungry Vortigen (Jude Law).

So they ship the ornery Arthur off to the black island (or whatever they called it) to hone in his skills against some of the oddest and most aggressive creatures the world has ever known. And while there, you see him have to utilize every skill he’s ever learned just to simply survive the night. But what makes this portion of the film so unique is the fact that it seemed as though they took the darkest parts on The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride and somehow made them even creepier. Now what sucks about this is that it only lasted for about 5 minutes! Ritchie could have easily dedicated the entire second act to this storyline but instead chose to cut it short so he could dedicate even more time to his snappy and over stylized flashback and flash forward scenes; a staple of his really when you think about it.

Now I will give him credit for absolutely nailing the montage of Arthur’s upbringing as that may have been some of the coolest filmmaking I’ve ever seen him do, but just as he did in Holmes 2, he relied on it way too much and it became stale as the film wore on. And don’t even get me started on the lame CGI battle at the end.

Ritchie clearly has talent and it’s slowly starting to resurface, I would just simply suggest to him that he sticks to banging Dutch hookers over washed up superstars like Madonna like every other London bloke out there and he will once again be on top of the film making world. I give Arthur a rating of kind of WEAK.