King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Of all the King Arthur movies ever made, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is, without a doubt, the most recent. Unlike with pussy, however, new doesn't always equal better.
If you're the Monty Python crew, you turn the myth of King Arthur into the farcical laugh riot, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If you're John "Don't Be A" Boorman in 1981, you film a Skinamax style, Vaseline-lensed Excalibur starring the likes of Helen "Back" Mirren, Patrick "Make It So" Stewart, Liam "Gallagher" Neeson, Gabriel "Churn 'N" Byrne and Ciaran "Release The" Hinds. If you're sad sack Antoine "Ette" Fuqua in '04, you make the joyless, Keira "My Heart Away" Knightley-wasting, as-forgettable-as-its-title King Arthur. And if you're Guy "ADHD On Mescaline" Ritchie, you shit out Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Arrows, I mean, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
A cheetah can't change your oil. A hooker hooks. Water is fucking wet. Is it really any surprise that the man behind twitchy, hyper-stylized, Cuisinart-edited flicks like Snatch and the Downey Sherlocks has made an epileptic seizure, pea soup mess of King Arthur's origin story? This is just what happens when you give Madonna's former muff-fluffer a hundred million dollars and final cut.
Ritchie grafts some Hamlet onto the Arthur fable with an aquatic take on the three Weird Sisters and their double-edged prophecies. Because England, I guess?
When he's not biting on the Bard, he cribs from The Princess Bride's R.O.U.S (rodents of unusual size) - and I'm not talking about casting Jude "I Am The" Law. And if 60-foot elephants (fine Tolkien nerds, oliphants) were pachydermerrific in The Lord of the Rings, 600-foot ones will be ten times better tromping all over medieval Britain, right?
*crickets*
Because Ritchie's never met a street hood he didn't want to blow, Arthur (Charlie "Sons of Monarchy" Hunnam) now grows up the leader of a band of colorfully-named thieves and whores - Kung Fu George, Goose Fat Bill, Saggy Tits Sally, like that - before pulling the world's first light saber from a stone and, despite all of his best efforts, ascending to the throne, handcrafting a big table and subjugating some Vikings.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. I fart in your general direction.
May 12, 2017