From the Archive – MOVIE REVIEW – King Arthur

Originally posted 7/21/04

King Arthur
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Writer: David Franzoni
Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer
Stars: Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd, Keira Knightley, Ray Winstone, Mads Mikkelsen, Hugh Dancy, Stephen Dillane, Ray Stevenson, Stellan Skarsgard

I do not profess to know if there’s historical backing for the theory that King Arthur (Clive Owen) was really Arturius, a commander of the feared Sarmatian cavalry serving Rome in Britannia. Nor do I know whether or not he and his followers stayed behind when Rome, beset on all sides in the 5th century, abandoned Britannia to the savage Saxons. I couldn’t even tell you off the top of my head if Merlin’s (Stephen Dillane) use of primitive siege engines is part of what made him a “magician”, or simply a rank anachronism there because bulky flaming things flying through the air are fun.

But when Arthur professes to fight for freedom and equality for every person, then lets himself be crowned King, I call bullcrap.

I have no problem if the movies take another excuse to suit people up in armor and let them wallop each other with swords and axes. I am all for that. And I will happily attend a revisionist’s look at the Arthurian myth, where Guinevere (Keira Knightley) is as ferocious a fighter as the boys, and exchanges only 4 meaningful glances and 1 out-of-place quip with Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) before abandoning any hint of romantic rivalry and laying down Arthur for a night that barely passes PG-13 scrutiny. But as is too often the case when producer Jerry Bruckheimer “gets serious”, his ambitions are not in reach of his carny barker instincts, and his ideas are hopelessly muddled in the attempt to boil them down to palatable clichés. What we have in King Arthur is a highlight reel consisting of the loud parts from Braveheart, The Seven Samurai, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I don’t fault the filmmakers’ taste, to be certain. Just their depth.

Director Antoine Fuqua made a crackling good movie with Training Day; he even found a way to film the towers of downtown Los Angeles that suggested some distant castle inaccessible to the rabble in the field fighting for survival. There was life buzzing around every frame – here, despite some colorful, dark Irish scenery and the rich photography of Slawomir Idziak (Black Hawk Down) there is only solemnity and the heavy burden of duty, broken up by the occasional dick joke.

Arthur and his knights – so depleted by conflict they can’t even muster a quorum at the famous Round Table, have reached the very last day of their 15-year terms of service. One would think they’d stagger these a little more so there’d be some veterans to mix with the new blood, but who am I to question the wisdom of Rome?

Instead of their freedom, they are given a last, seemingly suicidal assignment – ride North past Hadrian’s Wall (which they talk of as if it’s a terrifyingly effective barricade, though no one ever seems troubled to get past it) and escort to safety a wealthy Roman noble (Ken Stott) and his son (Lorenzo de Angelis).

This involves crossing through territory packed with hostile Woads – native rebels led by the mysterious Merlin. Not to mention, an army of thousands of Saxons has just landed with the uncomplicated goal of killing everyone they meet. Stellan Skarsgard, playing their mumbling leader Cerdic, is a long way from Lars Von Trier films here, although he does cut an unexpectedly striking figure as a thinking man’s long-haired berserker.

There are a lot of motives tugging at Arthur as he sets about his mission – loyalty to Rome, duty to God, the hope of winning freedom for his men, and because when people need helping, he does have the urge to do it.

When he rescues Guinevere, jailed and tortured for her pagan ways, she begins to point out that there are other things to fight for – like the country he’s lived and bled in and the freedom of the struggling people around him. And her thighs. It seems like an error in judgment, or at least a waste of resources, to cast Keira Knightley, so lively and charismatic a starlet from Bend it Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl as some sort of ethereal action figure. Half the time covered in mud, leather, and blue paint, the other half spotlessly clean in flowing, horribly impractical gowns, she plays her scenes as well as she can, but her character feels more like a marketing consensus than a person, and none of that true luminosity gets a chance to come through.

Owen shows all the sullen masculinity that made audiences notice him in Croupier, and is believably troubled by a task that seems to grow more impossible by the hour. But he never feels legendary, or larger than life. He comes off as the wrong target for the insistently grave narration and myth-making. Like most of the actors, he’s about as believable as you could ask for, though a bit out of place in this Bruckheimer vision.

There is one unqualified great performance in the movie – Ray Stevenson plays Dagonet, a taciturn knight who takes a jailed Woad boy under his protection; and he plays it with such down-to-earth conviction, such unforced connection to the circumstances. And when you realize how far down the Famous Knight pecking order he is, and what this means for his character, it’s a little sad.

Awkward things happen in the plot so quickly that you hardly even notice unless you’re thinking about them – watch as Arthur makes one of the defining choices of his life, and walks off somewhere looking resolved to take action, and then you realize he’s going to bed. In another scene, a character takes a hostage, but is foiled before you have a chance to ask what he realistically hoped to accomplish. Maybe it had just been 5 minutes since he had done something hiss-able.

Lumpy storytelling logic aside, displays of hacking and slashing are many and long, if somehow less than engaging. The trio of classics I mentioned above all found ways to make you feel dropped smack into the battlefield, loud with clanging and grunting noises and striking the right balance between exciting up-close chaos and those moments where you could pull back and see the whole terrible spectacle.

King Arthur, ever toeing the PG-13 line in violence as well (just how many people are killed by being slashed bloodlessly across the chest?), feels less immediate or spontaneous. We watch numerous shots of great hordes charging this way and that, screaming, but begin to lose a sense of which hordes are running towards or away from other hordes, and what they mean to do when they get to wherever they’re charging.

Meanwhile, major characters on both sides seek each other out, determined to have uninterrupted one-on-one fights whose outcome is never in question. And in the end, a movie that enticed us with the promise of something new shows us nothing we haven’t seen elsewhere, and better.