RATING: F
Who knew it could be this difficult to put out a halfway decent King Arthur movie? The last wide-release outing with the character back in 2004 (simply titled King Arthur) was a complete mess that barely had anything to do with the actual mythology, taking place in the Roman Empire era for some reason. It was also surprisingly boring. Now we have a new outing, and this one's actually a little better... which is not really saying anything at all.
This one at least actually takes place in Camelot, and it does use the classic Excalibur "sword in the stone" mythology here. It also involves Arthur being unaware of his heritage due to a treacherous relative having taken over the throne who is ruling the general populace with an iron fist. Once Arthur pulls out the sword, a small resistance of sorts immediately bands with him. He is encouraged to use the sword to mow down Vortigern, the kind of Britain who stole his birthright, but he is rather reluctant to accept his destiny.
The story itself isn't too awful--it sort of adheres to the Arthurian legend a bit more than the last attempt did. And there's a few interesting ideas here and there. Merlin isn't involved much, but there are some more mages in this general version of the King Arthur universe, which is an interesting touch. Excalibur's powers are seemingly upped quite a bit to some slightly cool effect (although the editing kind of robs such scenes of actually being that good).
The big problem is that the film is rather incoherent. Guy Ritchie's directorial style worked well for his Sherlock Holmes movies, but it does not work well here. We're given an overdose of horrible editing, some awkward camera jumps, confusing transitions, and out of sequence dialogue (discussing what will happen in the next scene while we're actually watching said next scene). Simply put, all too often you will probably have no idea what the heck is happening.
The action sequences do not fare that well either. Once again, there is a lot of poor editing, as well as weird camera angles, shaky cam, and some weird use of going from slow-mo to overly sped up and back again which really doesn't work well here. It's a shame too, because there's a couple of sequences that would've probably been pretty cool if not for all that.
The acting is a bit iffy as well. I just wasn't sold with Charlie Hunnam as Arthur. He never showed much charisma or much of anything, really. Jude Law fared better as the villain, but the few remaining actors you might've actually heard of (Djimon Hounsou and Eric Bana) aren't given much to work with in general, which also suggests an iffy script.
This movie is pretty close to being a complete disaster. There's a couple of decent things about it here and there, but it's just all too hard to follow and lacks coherence. There are times when you say "that's cool," but then there are other times when you wonder how this actually ended up being the finished product. Thus, this is another failed attempt at adapting the King Arthur legends and it could potentially be the last one for a while.
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