King Arthur

PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/6/04)

Leave it to producer Jerry Bruckheimer to uncover the "true identity" of King Arthur. (He is, after all, the same Hollywood purist who set the record straight about the love triangle behind Pearl Harbor.) Citing "recently discovered archaeological evidence," Gladiator screenwriter David Franzoni imagines a cockamamie story about the origins of the Arthur legend, flashing back a thousand years before the popular Camelot fairy tale. To quote John Ford, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

I'd gladly take the legend over this dreary pseudo-historical mumbo jumbo, in which Clive Owen's Arthur is upstaged by a grrrl-power Guinevere (Keira Knightley), and his Knights of the Round Table have been demoted to a cavalry unit assigned to protect a Roman-controlled Britain from invading Saxons. Here, history serves only to justify the movie's constant war-mongering, and the legend itself supplies little more than familiar character names to the movie's assorted action figures. ("Merlin" suffers the cruelest fate, reduced to a mangy-looking guerrilla leader.)

Presumably, it was the movie's savage potential that drew Training Day director Antoine Fuqua to this bloodthirsty battle epic, although the filmmakers have done King Arthur a major disservice by seeking a PG-13 rating. Fuqua's editors have been forced to cut nearly every flesh wound from the fight scenes, depriving audiences of the intended spectacle of warfare. Instead, spectacle comes in the form of a body-painted Knightley, looking like a corpse in fetish gear as she lunges into battle. Knightley's Guinevere shows little interest in lovemaking (or Lancelot, by extension) and bears little resemblance to the storybook queen.

Perhaps a proper Lancelot subplot would only have confused a movie already overrun with villains. Should Arthur fear the Saxon leader (Stellan Skarsgard), who orders death to any "man, woman, or child who could ever carry a sword"? Or is the greater threat Rome's bishop, who stands between the knights and their freedom? Actually, it's the "truth-seeking" Bruckheimer machine, with its willful disregard of that old John Ford motto, that condemns Camelot to such a dismal fate.

—Peter Debruge