The film errs on the side of gloopy CG confrontations and
thin characterization, especially in its drearily predictable grand finale, but
is otherwise fantasy filmmaking done up with pleasurable genre resonances. Its
murky opening, quietly drifting across foggy green hills while mysterious magic
erupts in the distance reminds me of nothing less than John Boorman’s brilliantly
bonkers sci-fi Zardoz crossed with
his Arthurian take, Excalibur. Fire
blasts forth and a ginormous battle involves a king jumping his horse from a
parapet onto an elephantine platform. This noble hero king (Eric Bana) is victorious,
but abruptly betrayed by a nefarious usurper (Jude Law) who covets the crown
(and works on self-taught Dark Arts, hoping to one day graduate to master
Firestarter). A tiny orphaned prince is floated down the river – Moses style,
in this never-ending parade of legendary allusions – and raised in a
blisteringly rapid-fire montage that takes him from naïve boy taken in by kind
criminals to a tough, streetwise brawler. Grown (into Charlie Hunnam), he’s as
quick with his quips as he is with his fists, all swaggering confidence even when
he’s doubting himself, like when that sword comes out of the stone and the
kingdom’s revolutionaries (led by Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey)
scoop him up into their plots against the evil reigning o’er the land.
Generally easy going and light on its feet, despite plodding
inevitably to a dull, clangorous climactic confrontation, Ritchie goes all in
on his stylish energy. His films, good, bad, and in between (like this one),
manage to be at once rough-and-tumble and smooth operators. He fills this
telling with snap zooms, propulsive smash cuts, speed ramping, and zippy,
fluid, computer-assisted dipping, spinning, and flying establishing shots. He
also draws on his Rubik’s-cube-jumbled approach to what in other hands would be
conventional setups and payoffs. Instead of long sequences of exposition
leading up to bursts of action, he will often intercut the two, cross-cutting
speeches and arguments and planning with execution. We see Arthur and his band
of would-be heroes devise a trip into a monster-filled wasteland where he must
learn to control his magic sword by placing it on a magic rock, their words
carrying over as the soundtrack to a lightning fast montage of creature feature
derring-do. This gives the picture a jumpy jangle, at once ponderously mythic
and casually loping. No one has time to catch their breath between spasms of
style, but the movie somehow accrues a sense of heavy sag.
It never quite finds a way to reconcile these competing
tendencies, but as a Ritchie romp – co-written, photographed, scored, and
edited by some of his familiar collaborators – it never quite loses its
loose-limbed charms either. They’re there jolting and jumping underneath even
the stateliest fantasy tropes, production design from Game of Thrones vets turned slightly askew, like when the Lady in
the Lake appears to pull Arthur through an impossibly deep mud puddle in a
dime-store adventure version of a memorably gross Trainspotting swim. So, it’s not totally satisfying. But it’s also not
every day you see a movie that straight-faced sends its hero into battle
against Rodents of Unusual Size, or includes a moment when a growling Jude Law
cuts off a man’s ear and whispers one last threat into it. Those are the sorts
of charming eccentricities of which these dusty big-budget boondoggles could
use more.
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