By Brett Blake There are few tales as familiar and recognizable as the King Arthur legend. Just about everybody knows at least something about it, and its primary players and concepts have passed beyond iconic to become their own mythology: Excalibur, Camelot, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, the Lady of the Lake, and so on. The task with creating a new film about this story, then, becomes a matter of identity - how do you take the familiar tale and make it fresh and relevant? Director Guy Ritchie’s answer to that question seems to be to take the bare essentials of what everybody already knows, strip away some of the more iconic elements (or at least hold them back for a hypothetical sequel), and focus fairly narrowly on Arthur Pendragon’s rise after pulling Excalibur from the stone. The end result, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD, is arguably better and more entertaining than it probably should be, propelled by a game cast and an ambitious embrace of the magical and weird. Does the movie bring enough new things to the table to justify its existence? Basically, yes. It plays fast and loose with the lore, but ultimately I think we have to allow filmmakers the room to try new things with a story that is as many centuries old as this one. On the hugely positive front, this is no “grounded” or “realistic” take on the classic story. It makes no apologies for being high fantasy, complete with magical creatures and monsters of all sorts, incantations, spells, prophecies, and a sword which turns its rightful holder into basically an unstoppable superhero. If nothing else, this is clearly the most fantastical (in a good way) interpretation of the Arthurian legend, and there’s a good bit of imagery in the film that is beautifully striking. Some may have had concerns with the look of this stuff being too reminiscent of GAME OF THRONES or LORD OF THE RINGS, but director Ritchie very much imbues things with a certain distinctiveness. There’s a conscious attempt here on the part of Ritchie and his collaborators to paint Arthur as just a guy from the streets, someone who doesn’t know his birthright (nor particularly cares), and is just trying to get by in the medieval world. This approach ran the risk of making Arthur basically a kind of rascally asshole, but Charlie Hunnam sells the character as fundamentally human, with a streak of decency that grows wider as the story progresses, and while the narrative doesn’t conclude with him having yet fully become the Arthur of the legend, the trajectory is there. Positioned as his adversary is Jude Law, who delivers a performance which has the right amount of scenery chewing without ever fully going over the top; his character is also given some humanizing moments which clash with his more overt acts of evil, and this adds some nice nuance... though it also makes the character feel a bit on the schizophrenic side. That may be a side effect of the editing. It’s possible that Law’s character was a bit differently conceived in an earlier cut, because the overall editing of the film itself leads one to believe we’re seeing a truncated or shifted-around version of what was originally planned. There is an energy to the cutting and the pacing (indeed, Ritchie’s handling of the early sections, which are constructed with heavy montage and flashback, feels aggressively modern, but it somehow works), but it does feel disjointed at times, particularly the midsection and the aforementioned characterization of Law’s villain. I’d wager there’s a significantly longer version of this movie sitting on a hard drive somewhere, and I’d be interested to see how different it might be. All told, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD is perfectly fine summer viewing. It doesn’t break any new ground whatsoever, but it does put a contemporary spin on the classic legend, and there’s enough weird magical shenanigans to entertains fans of the fantasy genre.
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