Uther (Eric Bana) is usurped by his brother Vortigern (Jude Law) with the help of dark magic, but Vortigern fails to kill Uther’s son Arthur or acquire the sword Excalibur. After being raised in a brothel, Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) becomes an underworld boss. When Excalibur resurfaces in a stone, Arthur and his criminal friends (Kingsley Ben-Adir, Neil Maskell) team up with resistance fighters (Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen, Craig McGinlay) and a mage (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) to kill Vortigern.
It is refreshing to see a different take on the King Arthur legend. We certainly didn’t need another generic version and this isn’t generic Arthur. So if you are a purist, looking for a retelling of the old story with all the pieces in their predetermined places, you are going to be angry. If on the other hand, you are a fan of Guy Ritchie and his street punk, speed-up, slow down, jump randomly style, then you are going to be… Well, you aren’t going to be pleased exactly. Maybe…interested.
I haven’t seen this much Guy Ritchieism in a Guy Ritchie film since Snatch. Thugs mumble incoherently or speak too quickly to be understood. Everyone is a smart ass. No one runs more than ten feet without slipping into slow-mo or having an edit move him ahead three steps. No sword swing can finish its arc without three time shifts. Is this good or bad? Well, it’s a style. It’s a bit odd when stuck in a fantasy story, but I’m amused by the anachronism of it.
So, if you can get past, or even enjoy, Guy Ritchie’s style, then you have yourself a clever film, with an engaging story, good characters, a world worth spending time in, idiosyncratic dialog, lots of action, and some fascinating, if not attractive, cinematography. And with all that, it is unsatisfying. The problem is that is doesn’t feel like a movie. This is a eight part TV series with large chunks missing. You can see the episode breaks:
Ep 1: The Fall of Uther
Ep 2: Young Arthur in the brothel
Ep 3: Arthur, criminal boss
Ep 4: Arthur on the run
Ep 5: Arthur meets the resistance
We needed four or five more scenes of Vortigern using his increasing magical powers. There should have been another half hour of Arthur dealing with street crime. We should have seen several more raids by Arthur and his outlaw team. The dojo master and his martial artists should have had another fight or three, or been removed entirely. The structure and pacing is wrong for a feature. There is a vision quest segment, but it means nothing as is. It is shown as a montage and we are not given the information or enough of what this means to Arthur for it matter. It needed to be cut, or enlarged. For a feature, there needed to be more focus. But if it wasn’t a feature, I’d have loved to see bro-Arthur and his entourage carrying off a few medieval heists.
The look and special effects don’t belong in a feature either. They spent $175,000 and I’ve no idea where half that money went. For a TV series, it looks great. For a blockbuster, it looks cheap. Much of the CGI screams CGI. The exception is the gigantic mammoths, which look fantastic, but they are only onscreen for a few minutes and then we rarely see full body shots (which is the way you would construct the scenes for a show trying to keep under budget).
Guy Ritchie’s first cut was rumored to be three hours long, which I’m betting fixed some of the problems, but not nearly enough, and would be a bit numbing. No, this needed eight hours with snack breaks.