Review of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) by Callum Y — 31 May 2017

It's not everyday that you get to see a film as frantic and energetic as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Guy Ritchie has practically trademarked his odd framing of time and witty, dialogue-heavy montages at this point, but they can sometimes come across as if Ritchie is aggressively flaunting his creative talent rather than crafting sequences that serve the story and allow us to fully explore this world.

It's by no means a terrible movie, but it gets very frustrating at times with what it chooses not to show or explain to you. Most of the film's action sequences are either glossed over for humour and runtime's sake or slowed to a crawl so that we can witness King Arthur's spectacular excalibur sword fights (which deserved more screen time), there's no in between save for a great battle sequence at the beginning which could have set the tone well for the film had it stayed it's course.

Take for example a promising sequence when Arthur is asked to brave an island known as the dark lands in order to allow himself to truly wield the full power of excalibur. The island is full of dangerous and mystical creatures, so surely the film would be able to spend a good 20-30 minutes there, right? Wrong, instead we get a 5 minute montage over a conversation between two characters that occurred before Arthur even ventured to the dark lands at all. It's choices like these where actions are played out over the conversations preceding them that become all too frustrating when you just want to be with the characters in the action instead of watching from afar like a fast-forwarded TV rerun.

The movie also fails to explain quite a few things, it's based on arthurian lore so obviously there are going to be people out there that will geek out over moments casual fans don't pick up on, but it really hurts the film when things are happening that make no sense at all to general moviegoers. I get that this is a world where magic exists and powerful swords are pulled from stone, but there's only so much that I can take before thinking "....hang on, what just happened?".

There are some big positives with King Arthur though. For starters, Jude Law is absolutely MENACING as the false king Vortigern. You can tell that Law had an absolute blast playing this role - he's full of desperation, envy, and pure rage. Daniel Pemberton's score is also great, it gets your blood pumping and pulls you into the fray during some of the more high-stakes scenes of the film. On paper the decision to blend the sound of a thousand whispers with tribal drums and harp strums is an odd one, but it works wonderfully and really brings the intensity this type of film needs.

Hunnam does a fine job as Arthur, perhaps the best he can with the mixed bag of dialogue he's given. He is a great physical presence and continues to grow on me with each performance. The rest of the cast are enjoyable to watch but suffer from Ritchie's obsession with style over substance. There are moments in the film where you're meant to feel a multitude of emotions for what's happening to certain characters, but you end up not caring about them all too much because of the decision to swap out important character development for flashy montages.

I did have a good time with King Arthur, but the two hour runtime seems to drag a lot despite being full of fun snippets of action. A standout performance by Jude Law and a great soundtrack help to keep your attention, but a week after seeing it you won't remember much else about Legend of the Sword.