King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, directed by Guy Ritchie, © Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2017.
Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty (harty@lasalle.edu)
Charlie
Hunnam as Arthur (left) and Jude Law as Vortigern
The
critics and the trades have not been kind: The
Wall Street Journal opined that the film was “Morte on Arrival” (12 May
2017: A12), and Variety even
criticized the outfits which the members of the cast wore to the Hollywood
premiere (16 May 2017: 37). Ritchie’s
film, like all examples of cinema Arthuriana (be they indebted to the legend of
the once and future king tangentially so or more) is inevitably caught between
a rock and a hard place. They must
confront what Norris J. Lacy has called an audience’s expectations which are
tied to the “tyranny of tradition” (Arthurian
Interpretations 4.1 [1989]), despite the apparent latitude provided by
Helen Cooper’s dictum in the three-part Films for Humanities series Tracing the Arthurian Legend that each
age invents the Arthur it needs. To
attempt to retell all of Malory—cinema’s favorite putative source for all
things Arthurian—on the screen is impossible, yet cinematic references to, and
nods in the direction of, versions of the tale(s) that Malory told are
ubiquitous, as just the Indiana Jones,
Shrek, Despicable Me, Kingsman, Mad
Max, and Transformers franchises
prove—and, indeed, Ritchie intended his film to launch his own Arthurian
franchise.
In addition to this tangential ubiquity
of the Arthuriad on the screen (and on television—HBO’s The Affair, for instance), we have generally had one full-fledged, big
budget attempt a decade to retell the legend on film—each age invents the
Arthur it needs. John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) originally had its many
admirers both inside and outside the academy, but it has not held up well. Indeed, when I showed it to a combined
upper-level undergraduate-graduate class last semester, many of my students
laughed throughout the film. Jerry Zucker’s First
Knight (1995) has never recovered from its initial designation as the
Arthurian film people love to hate.
Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004)
dredged up the theory of Arthur’s Sarmatian origins and presented a maddeningly
conflicted portrait of Guinevere who is transformed from an initial
full-throttled gender-liberated Boudicca-like figure to a more than annoyingly
conventional bride dressed in white gown and veil. And, now, in 2017, we have Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
To his credit, Ritchie does not
attempt to retell all of Malory, or of some other more or less complete version
of the Arthuriad. His sources are very
different—than Malory and from themselves.
His principal debts would appear to be both medieval and modern:
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the television version of Game of Thrones—a work that may yet prove the most enduring source
for post-medievalism, but that argument needs to be explored more fully
elsewhere. Ritchie is also indebted, in
no particular order, to the story of the infant Moses floating among the reeds
on the Nile, the account of Hannibal and his elephants, the legend of Robin
Hood, the cases of Sherlock Holmes, the martial training typically undertaken
by Kung Fu masters and gladiators, the Harry Potter series in print and on
screen, Macbeth’s “weird sisters,” Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, the
Viking raids on England, some of his own previous films, and even the Trumpian
tendency to miscalculate the size of crowds, though here Vortigern
underestimates (rather than overestimates) the size of the adoring masses who
show up to see him (try to) execute Arthur. They are not, as Vortigern avers, in the
hundreds, but in the millions. There are
also in the film all kinds of winks and nods and in jokes, along with a brief
appearance by David Beckham as a bad-ass black-armor clad knight named
“Trigger”—presumably without any intended reference to the horse once ridden by
the King of the Cowboys.
From the Arthuriad, Ritchie has been
selective in what he has borrowed. His
film includes Mordred as a rebel Mage who is killed off early in the film,
Uther and Igraine without even a mention of the “unusual” coupling that
produced Arthur, Vortigern and his tower, a sword originally firmly embedded in
a stone and later returned by the Lady of the Lake after it has been cast upon
the waters by an Arthur reluctant to embrace his destiny, an almost completed
round table, and an assortment of knights, some whose names are familiar enough
(Percival and Bedivere) and some whose names are not (George and “Goose Fat”
Bill)—all enhanced with non-stop CGI effects and an at-times deafening soundtrack.
As the film opens, Uther is intent
upon putting an end to a war between his people and the Mage, little knowing
that his younger brother, Vortigern, has been plotting with Mordred, the Mage’s
leader, to seize the throne from his brother.
Uther defeats Mordred, whose armies arrive atop and within huge
elephants, and peace would seem to be at hand but for Vortigern’s schemes. In seizing the throne, he is aided by three cephalopodan
“weird sisters” worthy of the Scottish play, who demand he sacrifice his
wife—and eventually his daughter—to achieve the victories he wants, in a
devil’s bargain that outdoes that made by Agamemnon. Vortigern—Jude Law on steroids who spends
most of the film delightfully chewing up the scenery and seemingly having a
better time being in the film than most critics had in watching it—is the
nastiest of villains. Law is a Ritchie veteran,
having played Watson in the director’s deconstruction—some would argue
destruction—of the story Sherlock Homes, and the huge snarling dogs that guard
his throne are worthy of the Baskervilles.
Vortigern kills Uther and Igraine, and the boy Arthur escapes Vortigern,
floating in a small boat Moses-like down the Thames to Londinium, a metropolis
whose on-screen population seems as culturally diverse as that of its present
day namesake. Once in Londinium, Arthur
is rescued not by Pharaoh’s daughter but by some kind- hearted prostitutes, who
rear him, until he can in turn provide them protection from their at times less
than genteel clientele, who include the odd Viking, it turns out, under the
protection of Vortigern.
More than somewhat of a light-weight
to play Arthur, Charlie Hunnam is nonetheless a Ritchie type—indeed he seems
straight out of the director’s 1998 breakout film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels in scenes replete with the
director’s stock stop action camera work and he-said-he-said patter. Like the characters in Two Smoking Barrels, Arthur and his crew
here are good-natured con men and petty criminals enforcing their own code of
justice among the poor and oppressed against a totally corrupt civil authority—think
Robin Hood light. Vortigern, cursed by
the promise that whosoever draws the sword from the stone will be rightful king,
demands every able bodied man in his kingdom attempt to do so—he is also, for
good measure, buying off the Vikings by promising them 5000 boys a year in
tribute. Medieval versions of the Arthuriad have Arthur himself taking a page
from Herod as he murders thousands of boys in an attempt to prevent Mordred,
his successor, from growing up. Here the
boys are simply being sent off as human tribute, as Vortigern’s England has
become a vassal state to the Vikings.
Arthur draws the sword from the
stone, but is unable to harness its power.
Imprisoned by Vortigern who wants a show trial to debunk the myth that
has sprung up around Arthur, the reluctant hero is rescued by Mage and a motley
crew of renegade knights, whose number include Aidan Gillen’s “Goose Fat
Bill.” Gillen is Little Finger (a pimp
no less) in Game of Thrones, one of
Ritchie’s sources, and Gillen and Hunnam have an earlier connection though the
British version of the television series Queer
as Folk, in which Hunnam played the gay teenager who is seduced by (and subsequently
becomes a lover to) the older Gillen’s character. And other of these renegade knights have just
as unusual an assortment of monikers as do the crew in Two Smoking Barrels.
When Arthur is finally rescued from
Vortigern, he is not at all eager to embrace the destiny that is his. Only when he learns that Vortigern has
destroyed the brothel that was his home and killed many of his friends does he
overcome his initial reluctance. To
prepare for what destiny holds for him, he has the expected passage through
nature that tests many a hero, and which introduces him to a number of
nightmare-like creatures that will be all too familiar to fans of Harry Potter,
most notably a very, very large serpent.
Having regained Excalibur with help from the Lady of the Lake, Arthur prepares
to defeat Vortigern, whose power is tied to the height of the Godfriedian tower
that he is building. In a final battle,
Arthur manages to kill the overly steroidal and now CGI enhanced Vortigern, and
establish peace in his realm, “renegotiating” the treaty with the Vikings, and,
with an obvious nod to an anticipated sequel, beginning work on the round
table.
Given the film’s dismal performance
when it opened, and its cost—it reportedly cost more than $300 million to make
and took in less than $15 million its first weekend—a Ritchie Arthurian franchise
seems a slim possibility, which is in some ways unfortunate. King
Arthur is not a great film—whether there are any great Arthurian films is a
matter of some debate. (There are certainly great medieval films—Alexander Nevsky, The Nibelungenlied, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, and
The Virgin Spring for starters.) Ritchie’s film does avoid the trap of other
examples of cinema Arthuriana (and the tyranny of tradition) in not trying to
tell the whole story of Arthur. And, if
each age does indeed invent the Arthur it needs, ours is an age without great
heroes—and, perhaps worse, one without any recognition that we even need great
heroes. Hunnam’s low-keyed Arthur might,
therefore, be just the Arthur for our times.
And with its sources in Geoffrey and in Game of Thrones, Ritchie’s King
Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a more than interesting, double-barreled mix
of both medievalism and post-medievalism as film.
King
Arthur: Legend of the Sword,
directed by Guy Ritchie from a screenplay by Joby Harold, Guy Ritchie, and
Lionel Wigram from a story by David Dobkin and Joby Harold. Cast: Charlie Hunnam
(Arthur), Jude Law (Vortigern), Astrid Bergès-Frisbey (Mage), Djimon Hounsou
(Bedivere), Aiden Gillen (“Goose-Fat” Bill), Eric Bana (King Uther Pendragon), Poppy Delevingne (Igraine),
Freddie Fox (Rubio), Craig
McGinlay (Percival), Kinglsey Ben-Adir (Wet Stick), Neil Maskell (Back Lack),
Bleu Landai (Blue), Tom Wu (George), Michael McElhatton (Jack’s Eye), Annabelle
Wallis (Maggie), Peter Fernando (the Earl of Mercia), Mikael Persbrandt
(Greybeard), David Beckham (Trigger), Rob Knighton (Mordred). USA/Australia ©
Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc., 2017. 126 minutes.
Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
