Guy ritchie mike the spike king arthur3/14/2023 ![]() Its failure is our failure.The hit “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” took at the box office was more than just a flesh wound. You could blame Ritchie and Hunnam, you could blame Brexit, or you could look in the mirror and blame yourself. Legend of the Sword was supposed to be the opener for a six-part franchise, but, as with the era of pan-European cooperation the movie optimistically sets up, it was never to be. Admittedly by this stage Legend of the Sword has forgotten it’s supposed to be about King Arthur and morphed into a Robin Hood movie, but its vision for Britain is at least equitable, inclusive and outward-looking. Tariff-free trading is surely just around the corner. “Why have enemies when you can have friends?” he says. The ragtag geezers are knighted, the Round Table is under construction, and the newly crowned Arthur even restores diplomatic relations with the uncouth Vikings and invites them to dinner. ![]() Stuff like Bridgerton is currently being praised to the rafters for putting actors of colour into British period drama, but where was the love when Legend of the Sword did it?Īt the film’s conclusion, this united nations of outcasts and lower-class scum overthrow the rural elites and establish a new social order. His ragtag gang of geezers features other non-white faces, including Kingsley Ben-Adir (recently seen as Malcolm X in One Night In Miami), and Daniel Wu as a Chinese martial artist by the name of, er, Kung Fu George. Arthur’s chief accomplice, Sir Bedivere, is played by the ever-commanding Djimon Honsou. There is a mystical Mediterranean witch (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey). Against him, Arthur assembles a commendably multicultural resistance force. This is a feudal Britain, ruled by a despotic king and his loyal barons – slave-owning descendants of “the old families of England”. The action scenes seek to deploy every special effect at once: rapid-fire editing, bullet time, extreme closeup, that thing where everything slows right down then speeds back up again – it’s exhilarating, poetic even.īeneath all the mess, though, perhaps Legend of the Sword was trying to tell us something. There’s a historian banging their head against a castle wall. There are gigantic war elephants swinging wrecking balls with their trunks and carrying pyramids full of soldiers on their backs. There are street chases, kung-fu fights, magic spells, Game of Thrones-y intrigues, uncouth Vikings, venom-induced trip scenes. Bosh! Now here’s some do-me-a-favour-guv, Only Fools and Horses-style wheeler-dealing. Bash! Have some epic Lord of the Rings-style battle scenes. Bish! Have some quasi-biblical myth-making (baby Arthur is sent down the river in a basket). It borrows from all manner of stuff, and chucks it all on the screen like a nonchalant plasterer. Legend of the Sword is also a total mess, which is brilliant. Then again, Boorman’s Excalibur also had a pretty forgettable Arthur and that wasn’t a problem (Nigel Terry – saved you a Google). Even in his big, sword-in-the-stone moment, he’s upstaged by a distracting cameo from David Beckham (“’ands on the ’ilt, stupid”). Sure, he’s ripped of torso and fashionable of haircut, but not much in the presence department. By contrast, Hunnam is a bit of a weak link. Having played second fiddle to Robert Downey Jr in Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, Law’s teeth get the scenery all to themselves here. His usurper is the evil Vortigern, a sneering, snarling pantomime baddie played to the hilt by Jude Law. Orphaned, ejected from his noble home and raised in a brothel, this Arthur must regain his rightful place on England’s throne through a combination of courage, teamwork, magic and slo-mo swordfighting. His mates have nicknames like Wet Stick, Back Lack and Goosefat Bill. How Guy Ritchie would refashion the story was equally inevitable: this Arthur, played by Charlie Hunnam, is a street-smart wide boy to be found ducking, diving and exchanging blokey bantz with the low-lifes of old Londinium taaaaan. Arthur’s re-emergence at a time of national upheaval, less than a year after the Brexit referendum, was almost inevitable. (Next up is Dev Patel in David Lowery’s delayed Arthurian head-trip The Green Knight, and even as we speak, news is breaking that Zack Snyder is working on a “faithful” King Arthur retelling). King Arthur isn’t just any old story it is one of those foundational myths of English identity that make you groan whenever you hear someone’s doing a new version – like Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes or Winston Churchill.
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