Guy Ritchie makes the wrong film in “King Arthur”

By N.B.

GUY RITCHIE’s “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” has had a notoriously bumpy journey to cinemas. After several other writers and directors came and went, Mr Ritchie shot the film in 2015, and it was due to be released in July 2016. It was then pushed back until February 2017, then March, and finally a heavily revised version came out last weekend in America. During that weekend it made just £15m from a budget of $175m, one-tenth of what “Rogue One: A Star Wars” made in in America over its own opening weekend, and a figure so far below expectations that the film is on course to be a catastrophic flop. Warner Bros. keeps hiring Mr Ritchie in the hope that he’ll turn a dusty old intellectual property into a blockbuster franchise, but it’s becoming a case of hope over experience. Neither his “Sherlock Holmes” nor his “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” was able to rival “Star Wars”, either, and now it looks as if Warner’s planned six-movie “King Arthur” series is going to be five movies short.

Not that its production difficulties should be held against the film itself: all sorts of beleaguered projects, from “Casablanca” to “Titanic”, have gone onto to do pretty well. The difference with “King Arthur” is that, even if you hadn’t heard about the behind-the-scenes problems, you would soon notice what a mess it was, even by Mr Ritchie’s standards.

The prologue is a farrago, with expository narration pasted over a seemingly random assortment of battles, murders, and wizardy hocus-pocus, but that’s not unusual for fantasy epics. What is unusual is that the confusion continues for the next two hours. When the hero ventures into a mystical underworld for a mettle-testing, character-forging struggle with giant rats and bats, and the whole pivotal set piece is chopped down to a fleeting montage, it’s obvious that the finished film wasn’t what any of its makers had in mind.

What they had in mind was a superhero origin story. Contemporary blockbusters being what they are, “King Arthur” is about an Arthur (Charlie Hunnam of “Sons of Anarchy”) who isn’t crowned king until the closing scene. Having been orphaned in that jumbled prologue, he washes up on the Romanesque mean streets of “Londinium”, where he grows from an errand boy to an unusually virtuous brothel keeper. Along the way he acquires an inexplicable northern accent (Mr Hunnam is from Newcastle), and he masters bare-knuckle boxing, as Mr Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes did before him.

Little does he know that he is the nephew of the wicked, black-dressed King Vortigern (a slouching, glowering Jude Law, putting in a more intense performance than the film deserves). Nor does he imagine that he is the only person who can pull an enchanted sword, Excalibur, from a boulder which sits tauntingly just outside the gloomy, slate-grey fortress of Camelot. But when Vortigern’s soldiers (including a reasonably proficient David Beckham in a cameo) drag him there from Londinium, and force him to grasp Excalibur’s hilt, sparks fly—literally. The magical sword enables Arthur to butcher his opponents at lightning speed while shockwaves shake the land, thus giving him an annoyingly unfair advantage over his enemies: this is Arthur as a cross between two Marvel superheroes who have been on screen lately, Quicksilver and Iron Fist, and the editors have cut most of these digital skirmishes down to noisy flashes and flurries of action. Like any superhero, he has no shortage of superpowered opponents, including those giant bats and rats, some Godzilla-sized elephants, and a troll with a double-headed scythe—all of them so blatantly computer-generated that the film might as well have been a video game.

When Arthur isn’t being a dragon-slaying superhero, he has some boisterous fun as a fast-talking wheeler-dealer who dodges the authorities and plans heists with his loyal mates Goose-Fat Bill (Aidan Gillen) and Chinese George (Tom Wu): essentially, he is a character from Mr Ritchie’s breakthrough mockney-Tarantino gangster hits, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch”. But that’s not all. He is someone who hides in a forest with a band of outlaws, someone who inspires the downtrodden commoners to revolt against the despotic king and his sadistic lieutenant, and someone who uses expert archery against the king’s soldiers. Does any of that ring a bell? CGI monsters aside, “King Arthur” is an earthy rebel caper with no sign of Merlin, Guinevere or Lancelot, so it has a lot more to do with the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest than with the Knights of the Round Table. Did Mr Ritchie get his British chivalric legends mixed up? Considering that its guerrilla-geezer sequences are the only ones with the director’s signature cocky cheek, it would be interesting to know if anyone thought of going the whole hog during the editing process and simply renaming the film “Robin Hood”. It could only have been an improvement.