Arise, Sir Becks... King of Hamelot
David Beckham’s cameo may just be the best thing about Guy Ritchie’s legendarily dreadful King Arthur
DAVID BECKHAM is really the least of it. Word might already have reached you that the former england football captain has a cameo in king arthur: Legend Of The Sword, and that he acts roughly as well as Sir ian mckellen might be expected to take a free kick.
But, actually, Beckham is very far from the worst thing about his mate Guy Ritchie’s film. That would be the cack-handed narrative, or perhaps the ham-fisted dialogue, or maybe the director’s own tiresome cinematic mannerisms.
it could also be the tedious over-reliance on computer-generated effects, or the transparent attempt to evoke the small- screen swords-and-sorcery hit Game Of Thrones. Or Jude Law’s leaden performance as the baddie, or possibly the wincingly self-aware way the film tries to be funny, by reinventing the story of king arthur (charlie hunnam) in the breezy style of one of Ritchie’s own gangster movies.
Thus we get characters with geezerish nicknames like Goosefat Bill (aiden Gillen), talking to each other like a bad writer might craft a conversation between associates of the krays. ‘You’ve got some heat on you, arthur.’ Or: ‘You trying to get me doing something razzle-dazzle with that sword?’
Or, arthur saying urgently to a lackey: ‘George, i need you to go to Londinium, gather the lads.’
That might be the single worst line of film dialogue since John Wayne, as Genghis khan in The conqueror more than 60 years ago, drawled to Susan hayward: ‘Say, you’re beautiful in your wrath.’
in this instance, of course, the line is meant to be tongue-in- cheek. Ritchie is trying, with mighty selfregard, to give us Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Broadswords. But that just makes it more excruciating, not less.
moreover, it’s not as if there’s any originality in lacing the legend of king arthur with comedy. monty Python and The holy Grail did it more than four decades ago, with infinitely more panache. No, the film has already bombed catastrophically at the U.S. box office, and its Britishness won’t save it here.
it opens with a frenzied, deafening CGI battle, which is doubtless meant to exhilarate us, but merely poses immediate questions. Who’s the angry bloke with the red eyes? Why does arthurian england appear to be full of gigantic rampaging elephants? and, maybe most pertinently of all, shall we write it off now and go for a curry?
STILL, no one can accuse Ritchie of not setting out his stall from the start. his film is like a two-hour trailer in search of a coherent plot, a pumped-up synthesizer in search of a soundtrack. it is a ragbag of special effects and set-piece fights connected by the merest wisp of a narrative arc. it is profoundly, relentlessly unenjoyable. in fact, not only is Beckham not the worst thing about it, he might conceivably be the best thing. he plays a thuggish soldier, with some nasty scarring around the left eye that suggests either a life-or-death scrap on a medieval battlefield, or a botched tattoo removal.
his fleeting job is to give arthur some abuse as he prepares to pull excalibur from the stone: ‘Oi! Both hands!’ Rendered, of course, as: ‘Oi! Bofe ’ands!’
BUT despite all the jibes he’s been getting, i frankly thought he pulled it out when it mattered. as, indeed, did arthur. The son of a murdered king, Uther Pendragon (eric Bana), he has grown up an ordinary citizen on the mean streets of Londinium and needs the magical sword to imbue him with the powers he needs to overcome wicked uncle vortigern (Law, conveying menace mainly by whispering and frowning a lot). also pitched into the fray for no very obvious reason are a sexy sorceress (astrid Berges-Frisbey) and assorted CGI monsters.
Throughout it all, Ritchie empties his editing- suite bag of tricks of everything we’ve seen so many times before: the jump- cuts, the crosscuts, the slow-mo, the speed-ups.
These techniques still had some novelty when he applied them to the story of another great British hero in Sherlock holmes (2009). But now they feel tired and a little desperate. coincidentally, when the end credits finally, mercifully, rolled on king arthur: Legend Of The Sword, so did i.
SNATCHED, made for less than a quarter of king arthur’s estimated $175 million budget (£134 million), is twice as much fun.
it unites Goldie hawn and amy Schumer as a mother and daughter,
which is a promising notion all on its own, since Schumer’s dippy, accident-prone movie persona might be considered a coarser, modern version of hawn’s, 40 years ago. And the latter hasn’t been in a film since 2002.
It’s a pleasure to see her back on screen, even though her character here is mostly a comic foil.
Schumer plays the vacuous emily, whose boyfriend (Randall Park) dumps her just before they’re due to go on holiday to ecuador. None of her friends want to keep her company, either, and no wonder: she’s silly, selfish and feckless, in an admittedly likeable kind of way. But she can’t get her money back, so she implores her strait-laced, faintly neurotic mother Linda (hawn), whose long-lost capacity to let her hair down is evident in an old photo album, to help her ‘put the fun in non-refundable’.
Once there, emily quickly forsakes her mum to spend time with a ridiculously dishy englishman (Tom Bateman) she meets at the hotel bar, a rendezvous which enables Schumer to indulge her affection for brazenly ribald comedy.
Sometimes, it works beautifully. At other times, she and screenwriter Katie Dippold ( The heat, Ghostbusters) overdo the vulgarity, almost as if the mission to amuse has been temporarily shunted aside by a mission to shock or offend.
But the film breezes along engagingly enough, plunging into a whole new realm of gags when mother and daughter are kidnapped by bandits seeking a $100,000 ransom. They are carried over the border to Colombia, leaving emily’s agoraphobic, emotionally stunted brother Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz) to raise the alarm back in the States, not very successfully on account of distinct apathy at the U.S. State Department.
With lesser performers, Jonathan Levine’s film would be a lot shorter on belly laughs. But there’s great chemistry between the leads, some entertaining secondary characters (including Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack as self- styled commandos) and a handful of genuinely funny scenes.