This movie is a long-running favorite of Internet nerds,
many of which wrote me nasty e-mail letters asking why I'd never
written a review of it. Well, here it is, Monty Python fans, so you
can stop cursing me in the name of Bill Gates. And guess what, I
liked MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, although I had
the added advantage of being able to read the script beforehand,
which I found -- where else? -- on the Internet. Otherwise, I
probably would have missed some of the key jokes because of
that funny accent those English people have.
As with the subsequent Python films, almost all the
parts in the film are played by John Cleese, Graham Chapman,
Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, who also
collectively wrote the script. The year is 932 A.D. and King Arthur is
making a trek across England to attract knights for his round table.
After a witch trial and fight with the Black Knight, who keeps
issuing challenges to Arthur even after his arms and legs have
been chopped off (probably the single funniest scene in the movie),
Arthur and his knights are stopped by God Himself, who parts the
clouds to tell them to go after the holy grail. So they do.
Along the way comes a lot of episodic comedy, like the
scene where a knight is trapped in a castle with over a hundred
lonely women between the ages of 16 and 19 (reminiscent of the
much less funny CASINO ROYALE) and run-ins with a three-headed
knight and the knights who say "ni." Finally comes the final scenes,
where the Python knights do battle with a ferocious rabbit and
answer obscure questions to get across the bridge. The ending
itself is bizarre and abrupt, but the rest of the movie has enough
hilarity to make up for the few sequences that just don't work.
Copyright © 1996 Andrew Hicks
