Saturday, May 13, 2017

King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword

Alright, and I'm back with a brand new movie on a timeless legend.

So King Arthur The Legend Of The Sword is an iteration on Arthurian Legends and tales so how does it hold up? Well...I'm kind of split on it. When the trailer first popped up, I thought nothing of it but I soon saw it on television and the second The Lady in the Lake grabbed Excalibur and the sword caught on fire? You have my attention! Now granted King Arthur is a hard movie to make without the magical elements in it. So I was excited knowing there was going to be straight up magic in this movie, and it was great! Now onto the movie, so the film kinda jumbles the mythology a bit, in the stories Mordred an evil knight was trying to disband the Round Table and take the throne for himself, in the movie Arthur's father fights Mordred and defeats him in the first few minutes. Which is fine, it doesn't destroy the story of Arthur and his knights so no worries there, but as it happens Arthur's uncle stages a coup, takes over Camelot and forces Arthur to flee the kingdom but at the cost of his parent's lives. So now we kind of have an everyman story where he rises to do great things and take his rightful place as whatever, in this case king. What follows is the undoubted stroke of the editor. It takes the movie a grand total of maybe a minute to cover the expanse of time from when Arthur was a small child to adulthood, the shots last a second at most. It is un-flippin'-believable! It moves so fast and yet somehow I was able to stay with it, but that can't be the case for other people! So Arthur has his own thing going on, but enemy soldiers invade his town, and by what I swore to God was almost a massive coincidence, he gets taken to Camelot by said enemy soldiers and his forced to remove the sword in the stone. At first I thought I stumbled on a film breaking plot hole, how by pure coincidence Arthur is taken to the sword in Camelot on a boat, is then forced to pull the sword out, and then the movie really begins. But then I just stopped and thought, well rumors have been spreading about the true heir to the throne so it actually makes total logical sense to round up every guy from his mid 20s to early 30s and have him attempt to pull the sword. The guy who does it, congratulations! The bad guys can execute him, and keep the evil king in power. Sort of like The Ten Commandments. But, I don't know it just really threw me off a bit, but not as much as Jude Law who plays Arthur's uncle and his inability to age! Dude looks the same when he was a kid and when he is an adult! Now he does practice magic but somehow I doubt he found that particular spell. Anyway, so Arthur gets the sword, breaks out, joins a resistance, and leads them in regaining Camelot. Not much to write home about but it's nothing less than what I expected. I mean the whole movie is really just okay. The acting is okay but there's one tiny scene with Jude Law that really speaks volumes, Arthur is no longer the kind and noble king, he's a bit of a snarky bastard. Scratch that, he's a massive smart ass! But Charlie Hunnam does well, as does the rest of the cast. The action scenes are very um...videogame-ish. I mean the second Arthur grabs that sword, it's like god mode! Excalibur breaks every sword, everything slows down to matrix bullet time, I'm pretty shure that damn sword threw a Hadouken at least twice! So sometimes the special effects look ripped from a video game, but these sets are pretty damn good. If you stop and look at these massive sets they built the film must be commended, and there was even use of miniatures. Now how many movies can you say that about in 2017? All in all, King Arthur is an average movie and could only be recommended to the most hardcore of fantasy and medieval movies. There's even a hilarious in-joke where Arthur has to fight giant rats and bats as training. Gee, I wonder why that sounds SO damn familiar! Well that about does it for me, more movies to review next week. Many more weeks, many more movies. Take care everyone!

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