| The
Sunday Times - Culture - August 01, 2004
Film: All
sword and no sorcery: The latest retelling of the life of the ancient
king is a bloodless and tepid affair, writes Cosmo Landesman
Damn you, Jerry Bruckheimer, and your relentless pursuit of truth!”
is not something you’d ever expect to hear, especially about the producer
of such films as Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down. But there seems to
be a consensus among people who have seen King Arthur that Bruckheimer
— and his director, Antoine Fuqua — have played fast and loose with
the fantasy. What, they cry, have these two done with the magic and
myth that was the legend of King Arthur? Indeed, no other Hollywood
blockbuster has made such grand and boastful claims regarding its historical
accuracy. So you won’t find knights in shining armour, dragons in lairs
or damsels in distress in this film. Here is a gritty tale of knights
with greasy hair set in the bloodstained barbarism of the Dark Ages.
It’s a film that turns its nose up at the legend and delivers Arthur
the man.
Which is a big mistake. This film claims that Arthur was a real person
(Lucius Artorius Castus) and he existed about 500 years before the Arthur
of legend. This may or may not be true. But who goes to a Jerry Bruckheimer
film for a history lesson? Reality — if you can call it that — has not
served the legendary character well. Watching this film, it’s hard to
see what all the fuss and fascination with him is based on. This Arthur
(Clive Owen) isn’t a great fighter, a great leader or a great lay. And
he’s not clever. I mean, it’s taken the man 15 years of slaughtering
and repressing the natives of the Roman Empire to realise that Rome
is not the great bastion of human rights and Christian virtue. Doh!
Fuqua is on record as saying he didn’t want to make the old “magical”
type of Arthur film because it has already been done. Fair enough. But
then he goes on to make a kind of cowboy/soldier tale of heroism that
has been done a million times as well. Arthur, a Briton, is the commander
of what’s left of a Sarmatian cavalry unit, who are the Dark Ages equivalent
of a Special Forces/SAS team. Now they have finished their dirty work
and are all looking forward to going home. But then Arthur is ordered
to undertake one more sortie and rescue a family behind enemy lines
of “woads” (resistance groups of Britons) and rampaging Saxons. It’s
a classic suicide mission that brings Arthur into conflict with the
top brass, in this case the Pope. So far, so Bruce Willis.
Mission
accomplished, Arthur is faced with the problem of what now? Does he
pack up and leave the Britons to a certain death at the hands of the
genocidal Saxons? What follows is a Magnificent Seven (there are actually
eight knights left) kind of tale of great fighters protecting ordinary
people from terror and tyranny.
Owen is a bad choice for King Arthur. There’s nothing
sadder than a pretty boy trying to act tough — see Jude Law — and failing
to convince. Russell Crowe is believable as a warrior; Owen is believable
as Hamlet. That furrowed brow, those eyes that have looked inwards and
seen something his mouth doesn’t want to talk about. Moody and prematurely
melancholic, Owen looks as if he couldn’t pick up a sword without a
three-hour ethical debate. But you can see why he agreed to do a Bruckheimer
blockbuster: this Arthur isn’t a man of action at all. The whole film
is about a man struggling with his conscience and convictions. He has
always believed in Rome as a force for civilisation, order and freedom
and then discovers it isn’t like that. This is a drama of introspection,
a tale of collapsed idealism.
The inadequacy of Owen’s performance is possibly acknowledged
by the fact that the posters for the film feature Keira Knightley more
prominently than him. Her Guinevere is no refined lady of the court
but an arrow-shooting action babe. On the field of battle she wears
a skimpy outfit that would have the enemy reaching for their condoms.
Knightley has a great face and a modest talent as an
actress. It will be interesting to see if she survives when a new pretty
face becomes the flavour of the month.
The film seems stuck in a kind of Dark Age funk. There
are no big heroic moments that give you that tingle of pleasure when
good defeats evil. And screenwriter David Franzoni’s characters lack
personality. It’s hard to tell the difference between Galahad (Hugh
Dancy) and Gawain (Joel Edgerton). Only Ray Winstone, as the lusty,
loutish Bors, stands out. And the battle scenes are undistinguished
— all thwack and whack, with no ingenuity. It’s odd that a film so proud
of its accuracy has blood-free battle scenes.
This King Arthur has neither the magic of the traditional
Arthurian legend nor the complexity of historical truth. Instead, it
tries to have it both ways, offering up stirring action-based heroism
and real humanity, and ends up delivering neither.
King Arthur,
12A, 125 mins, two stars
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