With his debut film, Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels, director Guy Ritchie announced himself as a fresh and exciting new talent. Despite a couple of decent efforts since then (Snatch and the first Sherlock Holmes film), his directing style has become increasingly derivative to the extent it feels self-parodic now.
His slow-motion shoots followed by speeded-up action, gangster / cockney geezer dialogue and rapid montages all feel mostly very tired. It is a sign of how bad this film is that one such montage – showing Arthur’s progression from child to young man – is by far the most accomplished thing in it. Otherwise this is a morass of boring dross.
Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) has been brought up in a brothel in London after his parents, including King Uther (Eric Bana), are killed by Arthur’s evil Uncle Vortigern (Jude Law), who has now assumed the throne. When Arthur removes the sword, Excalibur, from the stone he realises who he is, and challenges his uncle so he can claim his rightful place on the throne.
That seems to be a pretty standard telling of the familiar tale, but Ritchie was not satisfied with that. Instead we have giant elephants and snakes, a mysterious sea creature that chats to Vortigern, and all sorts of other unnecessary diversions. Most of the dialogue is terrible. Arthur’s gang’s modern-day cockney banter is not only anachronistic but pretty feeble too. The CGI is not much better than you would see in a film made for the Syfy Channel, and the action scenes are hard to follow and lack any excitement.
I’m struggling to come up with much else positive to say about this mess. It is good to see Neil Maskell and Geoff Bell in small roles and Bana and Aiden Gillen add a touch of class, but none of them can save this from being the current front-runner for worst film of the year.
Intended to be the first of 5 or 6 films in a new cinematic universe (yawn), the poor performance of the film at the US box office means that this is likely to be a one-off aberration.
Rating: 2 out of 10