King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Directed by Guy Ritchie
Starring Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou
Rated PG-13
About 10 minutes into Guy Ritchie’s “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” after you have endured an incoherent battle involving a stonefaced Eric Bana and ugly fantasy creatures that would barely pass muster on “Game of Thrones,” a disquieting revelation sets in: This movie will not make any sense, and it will continue on for approximately two more hours.
You proceed to slump back in your chair and stare, slack-jawed, as Ritchie does the same-old Cockney-posturing, rapid-cutting, hyperactive violence routine he’s been doing for just about 20 years — a full-on sensory assault that’s all but unendurable.
It’s supposed to be a “modern” take on the legend, with actors like Charlie Hunnam as Arthur and Jude Law as his villainous uncle Vortigern hardly even pretending to not resemble 21st-century people playing dress up. The story, such that it is, reconstitutes Arthur as a street tough who enjoys shirtless, bare-knuckle fighting (naturally) and only comes to recognize his true destiny after pulling the sword from the stone.
That sounds simple enough, but every moment is surrounded by so much busy nonsense that virtually every plot detail is obscured. There’s lots of intense screaming, slow-motion cut-ins of swords swinging and blood splattering, headache-inducing facial close-ups with the camera attached to sprinting characters and hollow special effects that almost single-handedly set back every bit of progress that’s been made in CGI over these past years.
It’s tough to understand why Ritchie keeps making the same movie, only progressively worse. His career began promisingly with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and has advanced downhill steadily ever since.
It’s hard to comprehend why basic nuances of storytelling, like the need for quiet transitional moments to break up the noise, seem to be lost on the filmmaker after all these years.
It’s even harder to understand why anyone making budgetary decisions thought pouring money into giving the King Arthur mythology Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” treatment mixed with fantasy movie pablum would be a good idea.
