The lunacy of Guy Ritchie’s film version of King Arthur.
Guy Ritchie is not so much an artist as a brand name, like Ed Hardy. He makes movies in an idiom unmistakably his own, but it isn’t quite a style, either. There’s no sense of intelligent design; no discernible sensibility. It’s a style in the way that the ingredients in a ketchup bottle might characterize Heinz. A Guy Ritchie film comprehends a number of tics, tropes, gimmicks and flourishes — none of them appealing. The familiar Ritchie argot — blue-collar, brew-pub Britain, all booze and brawling — seemed entirely inauthentic when the director honed its tongue in contemporary London, first in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, his flamboyant debut, and on through Snatch, Revolver and Rockn Rolla.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword wrenches our auteur back into the 5th century, but of course he makes no concessions to the period. The Cockney patois survives the leap through time with every obscenity and slang imprecation intact. And so our noble hero trots about Londinium with the boisterous swagger of a soccer hooligan, carousing and cracking wise with his mates. Not since A Knight’s Tale have the environs and accoutrements of medieval England been refashioned with such anachronistic glee.
Arthur, naturally, in Ritchie’s conception a strapping, is a cocksure ne’er- do- well lacking even the vaguest shade of humility or indecision. Regrettably, he’s embodied by Charlie Hunnam — still the most vacuous, least charismatic leading man in Hollywood, whose continued employment proves that talent is not a prerequisite for fame — which means that his braggadocio plays as merely bland. At odds with him is the malevolent Vortigern, played by Jude Law with inordinate verve; he, too, has been wrongly encouraged, and spends much of his time on screen aspiring toward a pathos wildly irreconcilable with the film’s otherwise flip comic tone. One can hardly expect an audience to take a movie seriously when the prevailing register is irreverence. One can hardly expect Guy Ritchie not to try.
These sorts of period epics tend as a rule toward the turgid, and so it is a relief to find that Legend of the Sword is if nothing else tolerably fleet. Exposition is hurtled through in jocular repartee. Backstory is dispatched in hasty montage. And anytime the film is obliged for a moment to belay an action sequence in order to satisfy the demands of conventional drama, Ritchie does his best to writhe and jitter through the tedium, souping up the banal with whip- pans and fast- motion. He’s especially fond of what you might call the cut to contradiction. It’s when a character says something like, “we are definitely not going to the castle,” and then the film cuts to that character at the castle. This happens about 15 times in Legend of the Sword. You can almost hear Ritchie chuckling in the edit- ing room.
Many of Ritchie’s f avoured devices seem so oldfashioned that one begins to think wistfully about the passage of time — the halcyon days of Lock Stock were so long ago, weren’t they? This is the sort of film in which someone listening to a story says “hold on, back up,” and the flashback begins to rewind, or in which the arrival of another spirited montage is heralded by a declaration like “lemme tell you how this’ll go down” and a swell of riotous techno music. I would suggest we are firmly in the realm of self- parody here, but that presumes anything about Ritchie’s modus operandi could have at any time been enjoyed in earnest. At what point does all this seem too ridiculous? When David Beckham shows up as an irate guard? When one of the only black characters asks if the Round Table is a dancefloor? I propose that there is no line available for Guy Ritchie to cross anymore. The project was doomed to lunacy as soon as he sat in the director’s chair. ∂