'Legend' a frenetically edited slog through King Arthur's saga
In Guy Ritchie's dark and soulless comic action tale “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” the once-and-future king, played by a stoically self-centered Charlie Hunnam, wins over his opponents not with stirring speeches or visions of a better and more just world, but with superior deadly force.
An entitled Arthur rudely jumps a long line of men patiently waiting to pull the sword Excalibur from its solid stone sheath.
The broadsword, when gripped by Arthur, becomes a virtual dirty bomb that detonates a dense fog of death and destruction, wiping out Arthur's enemies, but magically sparing his allies, who look upon the Excalibrated carnage with quizzical expressions.
Ritchie - who gave us a kick-butt rock video reinvention of Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. - attempts a comical, working-class cockney recreation of Arthurian legend, but winds up with a bluntly brutal, irritatingly atonal and frenetically edited, sloggy saga stripped of romance, sentiment and empathy.
“Legend of the Sword” opens with a spectacular battle sequence in which giant elephants are used to attack ancient Londinium, ruled by King Uther (Eric Bana).
Uther doesn't notice the lean and hungry look on his brother, the slithery Vortigern (Jude Law, supplying prerequisite villainous scowling).
Vortigern sacrifices his poor wife to a magic squid-like entity incorporating the naked bodies of three women, just so he can kill his brother and sister-in-law in front of their little boy, Arthur.
Arthur then is raised by prostitutes - only ones with hearts of gold - into a strapping young man with no knowledge of his regal heritage. Yet, he adds a big chunk of running time to the movie just by replaying flashbacks of his parents' deaths.
Arthur and his distinctly unmerry men (among them Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen and Freddie Fox) constitute a dull and dreary lot, hardly the sort you'd associate with Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table.
Minor characters in “Game of Thrones” emanate more charisma than these guys.
Sometimes they walk in slow motion, sometimes in speeded-up motion, and sometimes backward.
It's as if Ritchie sensed the ponderous weight of his story and dumped in every visual gimmick from his directorial kitchen sink.
Ritchie, with four other writers, concocts fleeting moments of cleverness and wit, but his emphasis on the brutality of magically realistic ancient warfare has been blunted by a PG-13 rating that mandates all throats be slashed off-camera and no naughty bits be seen.
During a moment of self-doubt, Arthur angrily throws Excalibur into the water, only to have the Lady of the Lake return it to him through a tiny pool on an unpaved road.
Only Ritchie could get away with turning this mythical figure into the Lady of the Mud Puddle.
“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”
★ ½
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Eric Bana, Djimon Hounsou
Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for language, sexual situations, violence. 125 minutes