King Arthur: Legend of the Sword review
spoiler Warning…
About fifteen minutes into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword comes a brief montage encompassing the entirety of Arthur’s adolescence. It’s a dizzying sequence; moving along at an absolutely crazy pace and conveying a large amount of information that’s relevant in the immediate context of the following scenes while quickly establishing Arthur’s character at large. And honestly I’d say it worked for me! It’s not exactly a perfectly assembled sequence, but I got a huge rush out of it and came away thoroughly impressed!
…Unfortunately this sequence comes after an absolutely STAGGERING opening that drops you right in the middle of an action sequence you barely understand, dumps a load of exposition on you about a conflict you have no connection to, and then continues in a whirlwind dash of ‘plot’ that moves so fast you will miss an important detail if you so much as blink. Literally, I blinked and missed an entire character enter the plot.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a bizarrely fascinating and flawed movie. At times I can see glimpses of a really great movie buried underneath it all, but it gets so bogged down by itself that it ends up completely toppling under its own weight. If this doesn’t go down in the film community as the ‘worst’ movie of 2017, it’s at least going to go down as the most fascinatingly flawed movie you’re likely to see this year. And I feel weird to use that as an actual recommendation to go out and see this movie, but I want more people to do that just so I can get a broader reference point with which to even approach this movie.
The most interesting thing is that I genuinely can’t tell if this is a movie Warner Bros. desperately churned out in yet another mad dash to create a cinematic universe to make them millions, or if this is purely a product of director Guy Ritchie’s artistic merit. The word is that Warner Bros. really wanted to kickstart a six film King Arthur franchise (yeah good luck with that), but hiring a director like Guy Ritchie to spearhead a large project like that seems a little odd. Ritchie got his start doing snappy British Crime thrillers after all, and that’s usually where he’s worked best. So it makes sense that about half of Legend of the Sword really does feel like “What if Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was set in medieval times.” But weirdly the other half of Legend of the Sword feels nothing like this; instead heavily pushing a Dark Fantasy vibe more akin to something like Skyrim in asthetics. I’ve certainly heard of worse combinations, but mashing these two together has inherent structural flaws that damage the movie severely. If what they were aiming for was a sort of peanut butter and chocolate concoction, what they’ve ended up with is a tub of Jelly and a pint of Chunky Monkey. I can at least say it creates a vastly different feeling than what you’re expecting when you hear the words ‘King Arthur,’ but thats more to do with the fact that they’ve completely reworked how the entire Arthur universe works. There’s not much left recognizable from the traditional ‘King Arthur’ mythos, and what is recognizable has been reworked to serve a different purpose. It’s clear that a whole new elaborate mythos and universe has been conceived to bring King Arthur to a new generation. I only wish the movie didn’t proceed to drop you neck deep into it with no warning.
Legend of the Sword‘s most damming flaw is its pacing. Due to the Jelly/Chunky Monkey mash-up of genres and aesthetics, Legend of the Sword ends up needing to crowd its entire epic plot and mythos into the pacing of a typical Guy Ritchie crime thriller. Everything about the movie is structured to move as fast as it possibly can, and it simply has entirely too much story and content to do this. As such, non of the characters are able to stick with you for long, non of the great emotional moments of the story are able to land with any weight, and the moments where the movie actually lets you slow down and process information are too few and far between. Additionally, the plot covers so much ground so fast that it makes an already fairly long two-hours and six-minutes runtime feel about thirty minutes longer than it actually is. Entire sequences of the movie that feel like they need more weight go by in a flash. At one point Arthur is magically transported to an island filled with monstrous creatures. It’s a sequence that feels like it should be a grueling action gauntlet where we really see Arthur tested, but it’s edited together like a music video. It literally breezes by in probably less than five minutes. And this isn’t the only time in the movie where a sequence is cut together to give you the bare essentials. Entire scenes in the finished movie play out EXACTLY as they play out in the trailer. Ordinarily I’d assume that there’s footage that just didn’t make the final cut, but it’s clearly in service of the style and tone Guy Ritchie’s associated with. I actually feel they’re using all the footage they have; there’s nothing that feels missing, it just feels like too much all at once, like trying to shove raw cookie dough down a straw.
And even without the heavily damaging stylistic and pacing issues, Legend of the Sword suffers from a lot of other problems as well. In addition to the story shoving so much of itself on you at once, half of what it’s shoving on you is nonsensical to the point of unintentional hilarity. At one point during the finale the good guys use magic to smuggle a giant snake into the bad guy castle that easily murders an entire room full of grunts, yet leaves the main villain completely unmarked. Where did they get the giant snake? Why didn’t they use it earlier? Why don’t they bring it back to finish off the main villain? It’s entirely possible snakes are being used to represent something symbolically since they had popped up in the movie a few times before; but the movie’s so busy I couldn’t tell you what it means! There are technical issues as well. The movie looks ugly as all sin. Shots aren’t particularly memorable or well composed, camera work and framing gets too crowded and unfocused sometimes, and the movie just looks like a grey smear for almost the entirety of its runtime. Action scenes are a disorienting mess. They’re usually chase sequences that make too much use of shaky cam, and they’re completely unmemorable. There are sequences later in the film where Arthur goes into his ‘Excalibur Mode’ that are actually decently entertaining, but they’re almost entirely CGI and keep zooming in and out far too much for you to actually make out what’s happening. I get that they want to show you the intricate details of the fight, since that’s one advantage CGI can actually have over a choreographed fight, but it just gets vertigo inducing.
The movie has a few small positives though. The cast is all decently solid. No one seems to be sleeping through any of their performances, and they’re all desperately trying to inject character into what little material they’re given. The dialogue also has some of that snappy British humor injected into it, and there are even one or two lines that decently quotable. And there are scenes where the pacing and the stylistic qualities of Ritchie’s previous work shine through and briefly elevate the film to greatness; particularly an interrogation scene around the middle of the first act that could conceivably go down as one of the all time greatest of its kind. Look it up on Youtube someday and you’ll see what I mean.
When all is said and done, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is not a movie I dislike at all. I think I’m the kind of person who could’ve potentially appreciated such an offbeat combination, and I wish it could’ve sustained itself to become a decently put-together movie. If this somehow ends up being some kind of cult-classic in ten years or so, I could probably understand why. But it’s just such a busy movie that tries to accomplish so much at once that it ends up not succeeding with any of it. It is, quite simply, a mess of a movie.
The Media Fire gives this movie a 3.9/10
