REVIEWED - KING ARTHUR: Donald Clark was underwhelmed by King Arthur, a grimy retelling of the legend
Just about the first thing we see on the screen is a paragraph describing the history of the King Arthur myth. "Recently discovered archaeological evidence sheds light on his true identity," it announces tantalisingly. Then the film begins.
With a tendentiousness worthy of Michael Moore, this convenient juxtaposition invites the viewer to conclude that, far from being a place where tone-deaf Limerickmen spent their evenings cooing at Vanessa Redgrave, the court of King Arthur was a filthy combination of East End drinking club and Glastonbury mosh pit. This may well have been so, but who ever said we wanted the truth?
Antoine Fuqua's wearing epic, little more than a tediously attenuated version of the first 20 minutes of Gladiator, suggests that Arthur and his knights were originally an elite special forces unit of the Roman army. As the film, which is indeed written by Gladiator's David Franzoni, begins, the team is, in the tradition of so many boys' pictures, offered one last mission before they can hang up their sandals and settle down to learning the sackbut in peaceful retirement.
Up beyond Hadrian's Wall a Roman family is in need of rescue. The rebellious Woads (tattooed new ageists) and the invading Saxons (humourless Motörhead roadies) are beating all hell out of one another, and the representatives of the governing power find themselves in danger of being trampled in the melée.
Arthur, played with agreeably Burtonesque seriousness by Clive Owen, arrives at the Roman villa to discover that its inhabitants have been prosecuting their Christianity with an uncompromising vigour. At the bottom of the garden he finds a hole in which Brother Ned Dennehy, Ireland's (and quite possibly the world's) most effective gaunt lunatic, has detained Woadish maiden Guinevere, thus managing the not inconsiderable feat of making the actress who plays her, Keira Knightley, seem even paler and thinner than usual. Alliances - romantic and otherwise - are formed. Eventually the knights join forces with the hippies to defeat the roadies.
There is some fun to be had from King Arthur. Filmed in Wicklow and Kildare, the movie uses the same band of hairy Irish hooligans that enlivened Reign of Fire (Dennehy, Gerry O'Brien, Brian McGuinness) to good effect, and Stellan Skarsgård is brilliantly Satanic as the Saxon leader, Cerdic. The gleefully brutal take on early Christianity is, particularly for a film produced by the resolutely mainstream Jerry Bruckheimer, rather brave, and a battle on a frozen lake offers at least one excellent set-piece.
But as the picture plods on it becomes ever more gloomy, muddy and dull. We could, however, forgive Fuqua, director of Training Day and the unspeakable Tears of the Sun, almost anything if the final (bloodlessly 15PG) battle, during which Knightley wears a bikini top that must have pinched something rotten, were not so ineptly thrown together. The director alternates randomly between the two visual clichés of the action movie - hysterically fast cutting and showy slow motion - to deliver something more confusing than confused. By the close, I had no idea who was hitting whom over the head with which implement.
And as for the claims of verisimilitude, well, frankly, who cares? We construct myths and legends to get away from the sort of awful grime that King Arthur flings in our face for two hours. Where has the magic gone, baby?
