King Arthur (2004)

★★★
If given a choice, I'll take John Boorman's version of the Arthurian legend, Excalibur, any day of the week over Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur. This new envisioning purports to be based on the actual historical figure who inspired the stories, but there are still plenty of routine plot elements present, right down to the hero and villain meeting on the battlefield, to raise a few eyebrows. The movie's accuracy is hardly the point, though. Writer David Franzoni took the characters we already know and gave them new backgrounds and incorporated them into a new adventure, to give us something unfamiliar to watch. It turned out to be pretty good, which surprised me. He'll probably tell you he was being faithful to true events, but as the opening caption tells us, recent archaeological discoveries have uncovered the true King Arthur. Since the evidence is recent, we hardly know the whole story. Give the archaeologists time to keep digging.

Arthur (Clive Owen) is a Roman soldier in charge of a small infantry pressed into service by the Empire. Mostly from a region called Sarmatia, this ragtag group of men, including Lancelot (Mads Mikkelsen) and Gawain (Hugh Dancy), formed the basis for the Knights of the Round Table. After fifteen years, the time has come for Rome to discharge these men and give them free reign throughout the Empire. Just before this long-awaited discharge, Arthur receives new orders for one last mission. Rome is pulling out of England, and Arthur must take his men behind enemy lines to provide safe passage for a young man who will eventually become the Pope. Northern England is run by the Saxons, led by the evil Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård), who is not a wizard but looks like one nonetheless. Arthur doesn't like this idea, especially since his men were supposed to be released already, but he follows orders and delivers the mission to his men, whose acceptance is based entirely on their loyalty to Arthur.

There are only a few fleeting references to the tales of King Arthur, starting with the round table itself, which we briefly glimpse before moving on, never to see it again. I recognized Galahad's (Ray Winstone) name, but I didn't hear any of the other signature knights like Gareth, Bedivere and Percivale. Keira Knightly plays Guinevere as a member of a blue-skinned tribe that sides with Cerdic's Saxons but might be willing to switch sides. Arthur and his men don't search for the Holy Grail, but their mission—the rescue of a holy man—is about as close as we get to that surreal mission in Excalibur.

King Arthur adheres to the rigid outlines of many recent period pieces concerning historical figures. Just this year we saw tremendous battles and flaming arrows in Troy, and Oliver Stone's upcoming Alexander looks to be of the same ilk, though I'm never one to underestimate Oliver Stone. Antoine Fuqua's foray into this genre also features big fight scenes, one on a frozen lake and another at an evacuated Roman stronghold, but he has a good handle on the battles and injects a lot of excitement into the story to prevent it from treading on ground too familiar. He gets a lot of help from Clive Owen (Croupier), who makes a very commanding leader and convincingly provides the emotional core from which his knights draw their strength. He's rugged, strong and confident, so Owen was a great choice to play the leader. He exudes all those qualities.

King Arthur's strengths lie in its wise choice of Clive Owen for the lead and the tightly directed script by Antoine Fuqua. At just over two hours, the story flies. This is a serious movie, but there are moments of humor thrown in that seems fitting for the time. Bors, for example, has fathered many children to different mothers, so he playfully refers to them as his little bastards. What's amazing is that this movie's occasional stabs at humor, and there aren't that many, are funnier than the entire Monty Python and the Holy Grail debacle. Thank David Franzoni for that.

© 2004 Silver Screen Reviews