I watched King Arthur with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley tonight. It sucked. Here's a few reasons why:
1) You know how Days of Thunder was basically Top Gun on a race track? Well, King Arthur is Tears of the Sun transplanted to Britain. Remember how Days of Thunder basically sucked because you’d seen it all before in Top Gun, only at Mach 2 in a fuckin' F14 Tomcat as opposed to a shitty race car? I think you know where I’m going with this… Tears of the Sun licked the festering ass of a dead homeless guy, so you can imagine how good King Arthur is. Instead of watching the luscious and oh-so-lickable Monica Bellucci sweat and traipse through the jungle and look sexy as fuck doing it, we get to see Keira Knightley shiver her tits off and charge into battle against men who are twice her size and could no doubt cut her limbs off two at a time if they could only stop staring at her perky little… teeth. Don't get me wrong, she's hotter than a Taco Bell three alarm dump, but she's no Monica Bellucci. Honestly, this movie followed the EXACT same formula as Tears of the Sun: our hero is sent on a difficult mission and grudgingly accepts it because, hey, what else is he gonna do? He's a hero. Then, when the mission is accomplished and he can simply hang up his spurs and fuck off, he is forced to make a DIFFICULT CHOICE. You know it's difficult because he agonizes over it for at least three minutes onscreen, and then has to ask his men what they think. The audience has to ask themselves: will our protagonist take the easy way out and simply do what he initially set out to do, or will he rise to the challenge and do what is morally right, even though it may cost him and his men their lives? Take a guess. Here’s a hint: Bruce Willis took the moral road and rescued all the "good" Africans from the "evil" Africans, and he was just some dumbass Navy SEAL who squinted a lot. This is Arthur, King of the Britons. Wielder of Excalibur, and Son of Uther Pendragon. Of course he’ll stay. But his men, having won their FREEDOM, have to choose too. Take a guess what they do. Here’s another hint: these dudes have names like Lancelot, Galahad and Gawain, and they’re KNIGHTS. But Antoine Fuqua (whose name is cooler than anything he has ever directed) throws a curveball at us: at first the knights really do leave Arthur to fend for himself against the dirty Saxon invaders. "Ungrateful fucks!" you say? Me too. So much for chivalry and honour and all that other shit that knights are supposed to care about. But then their horses (yes, their fucking HORSES) make the decision for them, and turn back to help Arthur. It's a bitch to travel on foot when you're wearing 300 lbs of armour, so they're kinda stuck going wherever their horses feel like going. Good thing too, or Arthur would have been riding some dirty Saxon's halberd.
2) Here’s something you’ve never seen in a movie: just before going into battle, Arthur addresses his men from atop his trusty steed, Gluebag. Picture it: while his battlehorse stamps the earth, chomps at the bit and impatiently paces back and forth in front of the troops, he gives a rousing speech about FREEDOM and how there’s no place like home, and he just saved money on his horse insurance with Geico, etc. Still can’t picture it? Think back to Return of the King, when Aragorn did the FUCKING EXACT SAME THING. Or, if you haven’t seen that movie (you're a homo), think back to Braveheart when Mel Gibson did the exact same thing. Or maybe Troy. Or Alexander. Or Gladiator. Or any movie where there's about to be a big-ass battle and the commander has to remind the men why they're risking getting their shit ruined. Personally, my favourite pre-battle speech has got to be Gene Hackman’s humble yet poignant recital of a few lines from Julius Caesar in Uncommon Valour. I’ve yet to see any movie come close to that. But they don't make 'em like they used to, I guess.
3) The gore SUCKED. The only real reason people go to see movies like this is because they’ve watched people getting dismembered and hacked to bits in slow motion in other movies like Braveheart and Gladiator so many times that they have memorized the blood spray patterns and it’s time for some new material. It's kinda like porn in that way - you just need something new. We’ve seen limbs getting hacked off, heads caved in, cannon balls taking people out at the knees, impalings, decapitations, you name it. So if you’re gonna do a battle scene, you've gotta have something new to satiate the male bloodlust. It’s not enough anymore to just have a guy swing his sword and show arterial spray arching through the air – you gotta show people that these guys mean business. You need a 360 degree bullet-time closeup of the gushing stump, and a flash cut to the guy’s severed head twirling through the air, with his teeth still clenched in rage. Then the head needs to be impaled in mid-air by at least two javelins or arrows, or even thrown swords if you don’t have the budget for arrows. Then those javelins/arrows/swords have to continue their flight across the battlefield to their intended destination, with severed head still attached, and impale some other poor bitch, preferably in such a way that the head slides down the length of the projectile and ends up head-butting the guy who just got punctured. I know, I’m a genius and I should be making movies, but I'm lazy and I lack ambition. But back to the topic at hand: GORE. We need lots of it - I wanna see buckets of fuckin' blood and enough bloody stumps to make a War Amps commercial. This movie had jack shit. Not one decapitation, despite the fact that Arthur is swinging Excalibur - the Ferrari of swords - around for the whole movie. What the fuckin' FUCK, Fuqua?
4) Merlin was a stupid cunt.
5) Arthur and his knights were Romans. What-fucking-ever.
6) It wasn't Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Nuff said.
If you wanna see a cool King Arthur movie, go rent Excalibur. It's got Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren (back when she was hot), Gabriel Byrne, and more T&A than you can shake a stick at. Avoid this shit festival like the plague.
