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King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

10 Wednesday May 2017

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D: Guy Ritchie / 126m

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Eric Bana, Aidan Gillen, Freddie Fox, Craig McGinlay, Tom Wu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Neil Maskell, Annabelle Wallis, Geoff Bell, Poppy Delevingne, Bleu Landau, Peter Ferdinando, Mikael Persbrandt, Michael McElhatton

The tagline for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a simple yet effective one: “from nothing comes a king”. But to quote William Shakespeare (and with the most sincerest of apologies), a better tagline would be, “nothing will come of nothing”. In fact, there are several famous Shakespeare quotes that are apposite for Guy Ritchie’s latest outing, so in an effort to provide a unique review for a movie that offers nothing that is in the remotest sense “unique”, here are some of the Bard’s most well known pieces of dialogue, and their relevance to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

“Now is the winter of our discontent” (Richard III) – strictly speaking, it’s spring right now, but the sentiment remains the same whatever the season. Ritchie, along with co-screenwriters Joby Harold and Lionel Wigram (his producing partner), offers audiences a King Arthur re-style that lurches from one CGI-heavy action sequence to another, all of which are edited in such a way as to remove every last ounce of excitement from every single one of them.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) – it’s hard to work out just who fits this quote more, Warner Bros. for asking Ritchie to make this movie, or Ritchie for accepting the challenge. Perhaps it should be a joint award, as the end result stretches credibility at every turn, appears as if it was collated from a dozen different scripts, and ensures its cast of characters remain as one-dimensional as possible in order to match the quality of the narrative. This leads to Hunnam et al all struggling to give decent performances, and all looking uncomfortable throughout.

“We have seen better days” (Timon of Athens) – each year brings us a fantasy movie that attempts to bring us something out of the ordinary, something we haven’t seen before, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword certainly has aspirations in that department, but instead it ends up looking and sounding like an uninspired retread/mash up of The Lord of the Rings (with bigger elephants), Game of Thrones (without the style), and weirdly, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) (skip the better days angle on this one).

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” (Twelfth Night) – this is the central conceit that infuses the character of Arthur, but once again we have to put up with a character denying his destiny for half the movie before taking up the mantle that he’s been due all along, and then finally going out and kicking some ass. It’s a tired character arc that’s been done so often it’s lost any kind of dramatic weight, and now feels obligatory, as if every character faced with this kind of choice has to be humble and committed to self-denial. If the movie had really wanted to bring us something out of the ordinary, Arthur would have found out he was the rightful King, grabbed up Excalibur, left Londinium, and killed evil uncle Vortigern (Law) at the first opportunity (and shaved at least half an hour off the movie’s two hour running time).

“All that glisters is not gold” (The Merchant of Venice) – the presence of Ritchie behind the camera, and with such a talented cast in front of it, just goes to show that you can’t judge a movie by its intentions. If you saw the first trailer and thought, “Hmm, this looks great!” then a) the makers of that particular trailer got off lightly, and b) there’s not much anyone can do for you. This is a movie that delights in showing off its various boxes of tricks, but as so often happens in these cases (where ambition should have been strangled at birth), once the tricks have been showcased, it becomes obvious that there wasn’t any substance behind them at all. And this is what this movie wants you to forget: that it’s made up of various boxes of tricks and very little else.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” (The Tempest) – watching King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is an often painful, dispiriting way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s also one that should have no problem in uniting audiences in expressing their general displeasure at what they’ve witnessed. They say that watching movies at the cinema qualifies as a communal experience. It’s such a shame then that so many people are going to be disappointed by a movie that flails around looking for a cohesive story to tell, and which does so without any attempt at providing wit or panache to help it along.

“But, for my own part, it was Greek to me” (Julius Caesar) – in this reimagining of the Arthurian legend (complete with a Camelot that isn’t mentioned by name, only title caption), the once and future king is an East End brothel owner long before there were actual East End brothel owners, and long before anyone added the word “mate” to the end of a sentence. Ritchie and his screenwriter chums may believe this adds a certain piquancy to the dialogue, but instead it feels more out of place than organic, and on occasion, forced. It’s a verbal affectation that does the movie no favours and soon becomes distracting instead of part and parcel of the movie’s overall tone (as intended).

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth) – while Ritchie is by no means an idiot (libel lawyers take heed), this is still a movie that assaults the senses at every opportunity, and which never keeps still. This is a movie for people who can’t bear to see a shot last more than five seconds, who can’t watch an action sequence unless it’s cut into non-sequential chunks, and who like their soundtrack pumped up as much as the movie hopes they are already. The action lacks intensity (though it strives repeatedly to attain the intensity it needs in order to be halfway effective), and the spectacle soon becomes mind-numbing in its repetitiveness. And the occasional quiet moments? Just filler, until the next action sequence comes along.

Rating: 3/10 – you’ll laugh (unintentionally but often), you’ll cry (at the cumulative absurdity/lack of ideas on display), you’ll want to believe that somewhere, in an alternate reality perhaps, that Ritchie has made a masterpiece; alas, a terrible plot and central narrative counter any such notions, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reaches us adrift on a shoddy raft of its own making, taking on water with every swell, and capable only of letting off distress flare after distress flare.

Pompeii (2014)

09 Friday May 2014

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D: Paul W.S. Anderson / 105m

Cast: Kit Harington, Emily Browning, Kiefer Sutherland, Carrie-Anne Moss, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jared Harris, Jessica Lucas, Joe Pingue, Currie Graham, Sasha Roiz

Beginning in AD62 with the sacking of a Celtic village by Roman soldiers led by Senator Corvus (Sutherland), Pompeii uses this back story to illustrate the determination to survive of young Milo (Dylan Schombing). Having witnessed the deaths of his parents, Milo hides amongst a pile of dead bodies; in doing so he escapes the Romans’ detection.

Seventeen years later, Milo (Harington) is now in Londinium, fighting in the gladiatorial arena and gaining a reputation for himself. His owner, Graecus (Pingue), sees the potential in taking Milo to Rome. On the journey, Milo and the rest of the gladiators travel with Princess Cassia (Browning) and her friend Ariadne (Lucas). One of the horses is injured and at Cassia’s bidding, Milo is allowed to put the animal out of its misery… and so, in these oddest of circumstances, their romance is born. Arriving in Pompeii, Cassia travels on to her family’s home on the lower slopes of Mount Vesuvius where she is welcomed by her parents, Severus (Harris) and Aurelia (Moss). Severus has a plan to rebuild large parts of Pompeii and bring greater wealth to the area; he’s also expecting the arrival of a representative of the new Emperor, Titus, to discuss the necessary investment the plan requires. Cassia is shocked to learn the representative is Senator Corvus; when she was in Rome he made clear his liking for her, though it isn’t reciprocated.

Meanwhile, Milo acquaints himself with the dungeons below the arena, where he meets Atticus (Akinnuoye-Agbaje), an African gladiator whose freedom is assured if he wins his next fight. After another slave attempts to kill Milo during a training session, and Atticus saves his life, the two men strike up an uneasy friendship. That evening, Milo and Atticus are taken to Cassia’s home where a celebration is taking place. Cassia’s horse, which has been missing since the morning, returns, clearly frightened by something and without the steward that was attending him. Milo calms the horse and he and Cassia ride off into the nearby hills to be alone. They are pursued by Corvus’ men. Corvus wants Milo killed but Cassia intervenes, and making herself beholden to the senator, saves the young Celt’s life.

In the arena the next day, Atticus and Milo are amongst a group of slaves that are pitted against superior forces in a recreation of the sacking of Milo’s village. He turns the tables on Corvus’s plan to have him meet his end in the fighting, but before Corvus can retaliate further, the mountain begins to erupt. Parts of the arena collapse, leaving Corvus and Cassia’s parents unconscious in the wreckage. Milo attempts to find Cassia who fled the arena just before the eruption; when Severus and Aurelia come to they try to kill Corvus but he survives, and he too goes after Cassia. While the city is destroyed around them, Milo, Corvus and Cassia try to avoid being killed before a final showdown becomes inevitable.

Pompeii - scene

There’s a grim inevitability about the subject matter that makes Pompeii a hard movie to review. It’s a disaster movie, and while that’s as apt a description of things as you’re ever likely to get, the movie does have a compelling visual style, and Anderson, while not exactly the most subtle or dramatically creative of writer/directors, marshals the final third’s fireworks with an aggressive brio that suits the material perfectly. And therein lies the problem for any reviewer of a movie such as this one: ultimately, we’re only here to see the mountain do its worst and satisfy the devastation junkie within all of us.

But before all that, though, there’s the lead-up, an hour of uninteresting, derivative anti-dramatics that keep the characters busy until they have to start running and screaming and avoid being covered in molten lava. Milo and Cassia’s romance is lukewarm at best and is played with the same level of intensity by Harington and Browning as if they were choosing a mortgage provider. Sutherland makes a great villain but his accent is a weird mix of public school English and mid-American vowel mangling; it’s a mesmerising performance, and almost transcends the rest of the movie, as if the actor had the measure of the movie from the very beginning and chose to just have fun with it (if so, he more than succeeds). Harris and Moss are wasted in their secondary roles, Lucas’ role is one step up from the customary maid in waiting, and Akinnuoye-Agbaje does his best as the noble savage who’s naïve enough to believe he can win his freedom in the arena, and is called upon to refer to the mountain in hushed tones whenever there’s even the slightest rumble or disturbance.

On the plot side of things, there’s too much lifted from Gladiator (2000) for Pompeii to be anything other than – for the first hour at least – a pale imitation of that movie and its easily more credible heroics (and Harington is definitely no Russell Crowe), and the whole idea of a plan to regenerate Pompeii before the mountain erupts is either a gloriously ironic move on the filmmakers’ part, or just incredibly crass – and it’s hard to tell which is the more likely. As mentioned before, Anderson is less than gifted in the subtlety stakes, and he piles contrivance atop uninspiring dialogue atop simplistic character motivations with the giddy abandon of someone who can’t believe he’s been given an estimated $100,000,000 to make a movie in the first place. (Yes, you read that right: $100,000,000. Where did it all go to?)

But when it comes, the destruction – what we’ve all been waiting for – is magnificent. Anderson doesn’t skimp on the pyrotechnics and the flaming rocks and the mini tsunami and the exploding buildings and the suddenly yawning chasms, and after the fallout from the initial eruption, gives us the truly impressive sight of Mount Vesuvius blowing its top and then some. Forget Volcano (1997) and Dante’s Peak (1997), hell, even Mount Yosemite going up in 2012 (2009) – Pompeii gives us the eruption to end all eruptions, a staggering special effect that will take some beating, and which is easily worth waiting for. It’s the one moment the movie had to get right, and it does so, spectacularly.

Rating: 5/10 – yes it’s extremely silly in places, and yes it’s full of historical inaccuracies, but Pompeii brushes all that aside by piling on the destructive spectacle and providing plenty of “wow” moments; event cinema for the critically unconcerned and in some ways, all the better for it.