KING ARTHUR (2004) Way better than First Knight... Gladiator. X-Men. Planet Of The Apes. Possibly Godzilla. Sometimes I look back on the movies I originally recommended and ask myself, what the hell was wrong with me? What was I thinking? I'm sure there's more than those, lots more. And the thing is, I knew at the time I was pretty soft on them. So with that out in the open, why am I still giving a (qualified) recommendation to this latest re-telling of Arthurian legendry, which I'll admit right now I'm being kind of soft on? The claims to historical basis (the ads called it a "true story"; the title card intro makes vague reference to "recently discovered archaeological evidence") are laughable, and I've never been a fan of flashy-boy Antoine Fuqua's directing, and that it was released as a PG-13 movie despite Bruckheimer's promise that they were making an R-rated movie for adults made me go into this movie with low expectations and granted, I'm relieved to have them exceeded. But as a swords-and-armor battle epic, King Arthur looks right, sounds right, and feels right, if not necessarily realistic - and those are the important things for this kind of movie. When I say I like Braveheart, it's not because of the ludicrous suggestion that William Wallace sired a king of England. Clive Owen plays Arthur, a conscripted knight for the Romans who's eager to settle down in England with his knights once they finally secure that treaty freeing them from Roman rule (conveniently for the Romans, right around the time the Saxon hordes take an interest in the island). We meet them in a bloody battle scene (bloody on video, anyway) where they each wield different weapons and fight in different styles so that later on we can remember them as "knife guy" and "axe guy", but it's a good fight to watch, with real actors and mud-spattered stuntmen and blood packs instead of big CGI armies, and the film's other two big battle scenes are similarly, uh, fleshy. They'll get that freedom, on one condition - Arthur and the knights have to venture north of Hadrian's wall, which separates the north of England from the south, into territory where the Saxons are making nuisances of themselves, and rescue a Roman official and his family. Huge doors in the wall are pulled open by draft horses and bursting, rusty hinges, which I suppose is to suggest they don't get opened often because when they get opened several times later, it's with much less trouble. Arthur and his knights are great - scarred and sweaty and whiskery, lined faces, hardened men which have seen much and done almost as much and are eager to sit down. These men would eat the girly-ass prettyboys in Troy for lunch and shit them out in chunks. Ray Winstone in particular stands out as crude Bors, ironically the family man. Only Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot - here an ideological instead of romantic rival to Arthur - is too pretty, and isn't Lancelot always? Kiera Knightley as warrior-woman Guenevere (!) is, as always, easy to like, though it's a bit of a cliché in its own right that she's the kind of warrior woman who could kick the ass of any man and slaughters well more than her fair share of Saxon goons on the battlefield. But without much of a romance with Lancelot (traditionally, the weak spot of Arthurian retellings), what else would you expect her to do? Curious that this is the Bruckheimer movie, but it was in Troy where the women did nothing but stand around pouting, waiting for their men to come home and make love to them, and here the women get to fight, and sing songs, and Knightley gets the movie's best line. Lots of mud, mist, trees and grass, snow, lush greens, skanky browns...King Arthur might be the first Bruckheimer-produced movie that could be described as beautiful, and beautiful without being too idealized at that. There are some shots which simply have to have been augmented by CGI (it's not like they built that whole wall) but they're seamless and are pulled off with the same kind of breathy elegance as the rest of the movie's settings. The plot is hogwash on more occasions than is good for it; Arthur orders a time-consuming fate for some evildoers when time couldn't possibly be more precious, and what exactly was a presumably intelligent Roman nobleman thinking when he took up residence so far north of Hadrian's Wall in the first place? Stellan Skarsgard makes for a good Saxon chief, more menacing in his silences than in his grumblings, though one wonders why he entrusts his dipshit son to so much as shoe-polishing. And inevitably, there is the big "inspiring" pre-battle speech, that most tiresome battle-epic cliché; here in particular since the people hearing the speech are supposedly the most professional soldiers in town and shouldn't need speeches to motivate them. The PG-13 cut didn't seem to pay off in its theatrical release; a longer cut was released on video (the only cut I've seen) which seems to add a fair bit of violence and gore, especially in the first battle scene. I suspect the scene where Bors's wife sings was probably not in theatres, but I'm glad it's here, an isolated portrait of something specific that the knights are fighting for, in addition to just footage of the fight. First Knight was the last movie to try to demystify Arthurian legend; it might have been the last movie to try to tell the story at all. If "King Arthur is way better than First Knight" is faint praise, then at least I can say that the things King Arthur does right, are (or should be) most of the priorities for this kind of movie. BACK TO THE K's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE