I'm a huge fan of the King Arthur and Camelot stories, well told for many decades and legendary in their storytelling.
So what in the hell is this travesty?
Writer/Director Guy Ritchie can be hit or miss. For every "Snatch" there's a 'Sherlock Holmes" but in many cases his style hits home with me. While a box office misfire, his recent "Man from U.N.C.L.E" screen adaption was a great time at the movies.
But this......wow.
Five minutes in, as mega-giant elephant creatures descended on Camelot with fireballs and explosions galore, a queasy feeling emerges that this is going to be more Transformers than Knights of the Round Table.
Ritchie's just getting going.
We meet Arthur, but now he's raised in a brothel and is more Oliver Twist than boy king. Once he's grown up, Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) does a fine job playing him as a muscled up action hero and reluctant leader, but is this Arthur??
The future king (and current street thug) must battle his uncle Vortigern (Jude Law, unusually underwhelming) and his evil throngs, so he assembles his warriors.
Luckily for our entertainment value, they include Bedivere (Djmon Hounsou, very good), Goosefat Bill (Aidan Gillen, Littlefinger on "Game of Thrones") and Tom Wu as George.
In a bid to political correctness, Arthur's band is now all inclusive, but seeing a samurai with martial arts in Camelot just seems more stupid than entertaining.
Ritchie seems to just throw action scene after action scene at the wall, and with a $175 million budget, the effects and scale of those scenes are amazing to see. But they mean nothing. Once they're over, they evaporate immediately.
Every time Arthur wields Excalibur, he's suddenly Neo in "The Matrix" with everyone else in slow motion and bad guys cast off in massive energy waves.
Visually, very cool while it's happening, but emotionless.
Merlin is barely glimpsed (travesty).
The final confrontation features a giant snake about a football field long in the middle of the action.
Cool, but is this Transformers/Jumanji or King Arthur?
Like a bloated, expensive, incomprehensible mess, Ritchie's film feels like a knockoff of "Lord of the Rings" with none of it's coherency or class.
The conclusion creaks and groans as the film sets up its sequels, which will never happen (thank all the film gods) thanks to a box office gross of $35 million against the $175 million budget.
This was one of the biggest box office bombs in the history of Warner Bros.
For obvious reasons.
Poor Hunnam, he's good in the role in what he's asked to do, but after this and the failure of "Pacific Rim", it may be a long time before anyone asks him to star in a summer tentpole movie.
He's worthy of better.
And so are we.
This sword should have stayed in the stone.
KING ARTHUR gets a D.
Do yourself a huge favor and go watch "Excalibur" again. Now THAT'S a King Arthur movie!
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