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A knight out
Jul. 22nd, 2004 12:30 pmThanks to a friendly publicity person working at the local multiplex, I was given a dozen or so tickets for a preview screening of "King Arthur". The trailers that I'd seen had more or less given the game away - that the film was not going to be very good. And so it proved.
Here's a film with an identity crisis - is it "Gladiator"? (Screenwriter David Franzoni co-wrote that one with William Nicholson and John Logan). Is it "Braveheart"? (Some of the locations - and most of the extras - looked quite familiar). Is it all those siege/battle/Arthurian influenced bits of "Lord of the Rings"? No, it's a confused and confusing bombastic take on a historical period so distant that it's hard to get upset at the liberties taken.
Clive Owen has been on the verge of a career as a leading man in Hollywood for, oh, about six years now (since "Croupier"). Sadly, this won't do the trick for him - he has nothing to work with in the script beyond hints of a troubled Christian conscience. Keira Knightley, thankfully, doesn't appear for a while, sparing the audience her emphatic line-readings and pouting. Merlin, who could have been an enigmatic, mysterious off-stage manipulator is merely another guerilla rebel in fetching green and blue 'woad' make-up.
The highlight of the film is a battle on a frozen lake - a sequence which apparently is a refugee from the original script of "Gladiator", and one which William Nicholson adapted and used in "Firesong". Just when the film seems to have got its act together, though, we then cut back to Hadrian's Wall - with no explanation or caption as to how much time has passed.
I'm sure there's a decent revisionist Arthurian epic to be made - but this isn't it, and one can only speculate on what might have been, the woad not taken.
Here's a film with an identity crisis - is it "Gladiator"? (Screenwriter David Franzoni co-wrote that one with William Nicholson and John Logan). Is it "Braveheart"? (Some of the locations - and most of the extras - looked quite familiar). Is it all those siege/battle/Arthurian influenced bits of "Lord of the Rings"? No, it's a confused and confusing bombastic take on a historical period so distant that it's hard to get upset at the liberties taken.
Clive Owen has been on the verge of a career as a leading man in Hollywood for, oh, about six years now (since "Croupier"). Sadly, this won't do the trick for him - he has nothing to work with in the script beyond hints of a troubled Christian conscience. Keira Knightley, thankfully, doesn't appear for a while, sparing the audience her emphatic line-readings and pouting. Merlin, who could have been an enigmatic, mysterious off-stage manipulator is merely another guerilla rebel in fetching green and blue 'woad' make-up.
The highlight of the film is a battle on a frozen lake - a sequence which apparently is a refugee from the original script of "Gladiator", and one which William Nicholson adapted and used in "Firesong". Just when the film seems to have got its act together, though, we then cut back to Hadrian's Wall - with no explanation or caption as to how much time has passed.
I'm sure there's a decent revisionist Arthurian epic to be made - but this isn't it, and one can only speculate on what might have been, the woad not taken.
