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Review by Harvey Karten
2 stars out of 4
You're a single woman, an incurable romantic, who lives in
Anytown USA but longs to take up residence in Camelot. You
dream that Merlin will conjure up a Galahad or Lancelot and that
your garden will be guarded over by a large sword stuck tightly
in stone. Your friends tell you to come down to earth, so you go
to Antoine Fuqua's "King Arthur" where you find out that, yes,
the title character probably did exist, a half-Roman, half-British
fellow by the name of Lucius Artorius Castus, that Lancelot and
Galahad are as handsome as you imagined, but then you wake
up from your reverie. You see this new, de-romanticized
version of Arthur. You note that Clive Owen in the title role
(along with the rest of the cast and crew) is taking a bigger
gamble than he ever did in "Croupier," and that while you might
be wide-eyed at the final battle scene between the Arthur-Merlin
alliance against the dirty Saxons, you'll write even that off as
typical, hackneyed, seen-it-done-that-in-"The Last Samurai" and
scores of other action pics. You may go home and open a
physics book to see how arrows shot at 45-degree angles over
an Irish landscape the size of a football field can kill scores of
well-armored warriors.
In this version Arthur, in the service of Rome with the knights
of the Round Table, including Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd), Galahad
(Hugh Dancy), Bors (Ray Winstone), Gawain (Joel Edgerton),
Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen), and Dagonet (Ray Stevenson), is
ready to accept discharge from the legions when the bishop tells
him that discharge papers are his, but only after one more
assignment. (You'd almost think that writer David Franzoni
wants us to think of our soldiers in Iraq whose discharge was
put on hold by the Bush administration.) He has to go to war
to bring back the pope's favorite godson, but that part of the
story gets kind of lost in the fighting. We're not in the fifteenth
century of the Camelot legend but in the down-and-dirty fifth
when the Roman legions were being besieged by Saxons,
Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns and assorted rabble determined,
like America's enemies today, to crush Western civilization. As
Rome exits from Britain, Merlin and Arthur, former enemies,
make an alliance against a common enemy–something like
Sunni and Shiites banding together today against their
liberators. The best thing about this picture is the chief villain,
the Saxon Cerdic (Stellan Skargard) known to Arthur as simply
"Saxon," a chap fond of saying "kill them all and burn the
village."
Before the big battle, Arthur frees Guinevere (Keira Knightley,
who turns out to be a handful on the battlefield), as the lady has
been incarcerated for practicing paganism. Over the next few
weeks, though Guinevere is destined to pad down with Arthur,
she does cast a few glances toward Lancelot, but one wonders
what she sees in him or any of the other knights since nobody,
not even the female warrior, is blessed with the slightest
character development.
When Arthur ultimately decides that he's no longer fighting for
Rome but for a higher cause, we strain our ears to hear that,
like our president today, his higher cause is freedom–to the
cheers of the unwashed in the background. Huh? Freedom
from what? Not even the alleged slavery is given any
exploration, so we're about as in the dark about Arthur's motive
as we are about Mr. Bush's. All in all, a forgettable epic
drowned out by music and, speaking of drowning, there is a nifty
scene that will remind biblical scholars of the parting of the Red
Sea.
Copyright © 2004 Harvey Karten
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out of 4
