King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Go have fun, here's 175 million! And Guy Ritchie indeed had his fun. An audiovisual hedonist's paradise. Thirty-five years ago, Boorman was shitting out fabulous processed meals of Orff, double-bladed axes, and a mighty fistful of armor. Now it’s Ritchie shitting them out in his concept of post-modern fantasy (the costumes alone, or the way they talk), helped along by killer editing, unscrupulous and megalomaniacal CGI, complete resignation to the formal standards of the "great glorious epic", and presenting a coked-up ride where anything goes and, except for rare moments, there’s never any time to think about why what's happening is actually happening. It cleverly intersperses prologues to the individual scenes with scenes like ("Let’s take him to the Dark Land." "No way!" – "Welcome to the Dark Land."), for example, so we're not rocking the usual boat of relax-relax-relax-action, but constantly riding the Shikansen to the God of War finish. The soundtrack, the greatest ride since Mad Max, accompanies this perfectly, at times seizing the reins of the entire experience, and there won’t be a shortage of joggers breaking their necks when they pop it into their headphones. Add to that, here we have Arthur running around in sped-up shots from which the frames are cut, characters wearing an Aronofsky-esque first-person steadycam on their bodies, slowing down, stopping, the camera whirls around like its life depended on it, pans, macros, micros, Malá Fatra, Veľká Fatra, you name it. Too bad it doesn't earn its keep, because this is not a film you'll do much relaxing with. PS: Please nominate the protagonist's coming of age montage for the Nobel Prize for editing. (16/05/2017)

I have to give it to Guy Ritchie – his movies have style. Whatever he films ends up fantastic. But I can’t shake the feeling that some of the scenes tend to go over the top. The beginning was amazing. The very first scene was gripping, it tells Arthur’s story since early childhood until the age where the rest of the story begins. It’s original, quick, entertaining… for about an hour. Then the ideas thin out and the whole thing gets repetitive. That’s when it loses its magic and becomes a classic Guy Ritchie movie. I can’t say he’s not being inventive, but my initial excitement has quickly grown cold. And even though I admire the effort to shoot a King Arthur fantasy from a different angle, I still couldn’t piece the story together and all I could do was to watch some CGI hocus pocus. (02/08/2018)

My Lord in heaven! A dark fantasy in a ball-busting visual barrage, where everything is so horribly over the top that I fully understand the viewers who sent it down the drain. This film takes all sorts of genre motifs and glues them onto a gritty story with the amount of gusto the director last had seventeen years ago. I was still a little hesitant at the intro with the gigantic elephants, but then in a brilliant cut Arthur grows up and I knew it was home run. This was because we got Ritchie's beloved staircase run with Pemberton's punchy underscore, and it doesn't lag during the special effects orgy when everyone knew they could break free from their chains, including the actors. Jude Law plays the villain in the same style as in The Young Pope, and it's an absolutely decadent blockbuster. And Charlie Hunnam? Even in Pacific Rim, I thought he had suspicious charisma for a sweet 20-something girl idol, and here he's taking advantage of it in the best possible way. I was pretty hesitant about going to the movie theater because the trailer campaign was very bland, but seeing that with a budget of 175 million, it has grossed (2 months after the premiere) about 145 million worldwide, it's clear to me that someone at Warner had cardinally screwed up. The best fantasy since The Lord of the Rings. (22/07/2017)

Ritchie’s Arthur isn’t flawless, but it certainly doesn’t lack confidence. The genre mix of British gangster movie with fantasy adventure works, dripping with originality. The storytelling is like drunken bragging at the pub, about what if and isn’t always linear. Time slips by as required. Hunnam is good, plays his part, but Jude Law in true papal style rules with an iron fist in this movie. Not everybody will be keen on this modern approach, but this is the way ahead, and it must be trampled down a little more. Magic at work. Convincing effects. Pemberton’s music is just fantastic, a great soundtrack. (11/05/2017)

I emphatically recommend that this film not be seen by people suffering from ophidiophobia (because there are a lot of snakes in it, including an incredibly big one) or by video-game designer Dan Vávra (because he might not be able to handle such a politically correct version of medieval England with black and Chinese people and strong female characters). Other gamers, however, might be satisfied with the film, as the hyperkinetic (in other words, terribly chaotic) and almost entirely CGI action scenes, especially the last one, look like an in-game video cut out of an action movie. King Arthur is generally reminiscent of a number of pop-culture products: a music video for an English folk song, a kung-fu movie, a bad 1980s fantasy flick, a good fantasy flick from the aughts, a Monty Python sketch (“This is a table. You sit at it.”), and so on. Due to the many sources of inspiration, the unfocused narrative (even when that lack of focus is not justified by the narrating character’s poor memory), and the constant flitting between ridiculing Arthurian legends and their ultracool, self-absorbed and humourless modernisation for today’s nerds, the film is a terrible, eclectic mess. It doesn’t help much that Guy Ritchie attempted to give it some sort of order by approaching the film as another one of his London gangster flicks. Though the story is not set in the present, but in an alternate Middle Ages with wizards, giant rats and a sword that performs as a weapon of mass destruction, it is otherwise a tediously manneristic variation on something that’s been seen before. We have here a group of nobodies speaking cockney English who act first and think later, whose plan to outwit their opponents goes fatally wrong, a fidgety narrative with a timeline that’s all over the map, a psychopathic villain who does very nasty things to his victims (which, however, will please fans of Reservoir Dogs), and a chase scene filmed partly with GoPro cameras. Ritchie was able to use all of these things more effectively in his previous films, which also managed to get by with a pathos-ridden origin story based on the protagonist frequently having nightmares and fainting. Whereas Tarantino is maturing, Ritchie refuses to grow up, making the same movie again and again, and despite occasional flashes of refreshing creative invention, it mostly feels rather forced in this case. 50% (12/05/2017)