by Chris Feil
Guy Ritchie thrives on comedic machismo. Even when gratingly stylized or frenetically composed, his work is never less than entertaining when breaking down how buffoonish men interact. So King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a natural fit for the director’s next big budget exercise. In some ways, Arthur and his knights of the round table were the original bros...
So it’s not very surprising that this Ritchie telling is at its best when it’s Arthur and company bouncing off of one another. Ritchie’s penchant for witty montage and male repartee is one of the ways he revitalizes this often rehashed story of Arthur’s rise after pulling Excalibur from the stone. Even though the setting is pre-round table, Ritchie finds a lot of excuses for bro banter as Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) seeks to defeat his evil king uncle Vortigern (Jude Law).
But the film is mostly lifeless elsewhere. There are enough anachronisms to the lavish design to make moments stand out without ever really impressing, not matching the lively point of view brought to the characters. You have to wade through enough video game murkiness (especially the big battle finale and opening chapter) that it’s easy to forget just how fun the film is when it follows its own path instead of the laws of summer CGI-fests.
The film simply falls into all of the cliches we yawn at with a medieval actioner: a parched color palate, lumpy unexamined mysticism, Eric Bana.
Charlie Hunnam remains something of a curiosity for a mainstream entertainment. He has the charisma and screen presence of a genuine movie star, but big budget directors remain unable to tap into it in a star-making way. While James Gray’s The Lost City of Z used the actor's introverted presence quite perfectly, his work here gets drowned out. Arthur should inspire immediate reverence for the audience, and that fact that Hunnam doesn’t is more the fault of the film than the actor.
Similarly, Jude Law’s villain is also a non-starter. The opportunity for dastardly drag and evil camp is laid pretty bare here (his name is Vortigern, for god’s sake), but Law is fairly nondescipt. Like how the film doesn’t know how to present Arthur as heroic, it doesn’t ask Law to be all that villainous beyond a whisper and one flashy suit of armor. If your film is only as interesting as your bad guy, then this might be Ritchie’s biggest miss here.
King Arthur has the spark of something fresh, but gets complacent with the same old, same old. For us to get excited about this kind of action film once again, we’re going to need more than half-steps on the way to reinvention.
Grade: C