'King Arthur' Is 2017's Biggest Flop, But It Shouldn't Be

king arthur: legend of the sword

King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword is the year’s biggest cinematic flop, a tentpole picture expected to cost Warner Bros. a $150mil loss. This financial failure has meant that the film is ‘fair game’ for the kind of spineless critics who normally toe the company line; the world invited to delight in this evident disaster. Yet, in reality, the greatest crime of Guy Ritchie’s movie is, only, its failure to make money; to deliver on its corporate mandate to lay the foundation for a planned-for six film(!) series.

Watching Legend Of The Sword, your old pal Film Carew encountered not some dismal disaster, but a film that is oft delightful. Full of energy and idiosyncrasy, it’s a bonkers rumpus in which the sublime and the ridiculous cavort through a bawdy, blokey take on Arthurian legend that plays as equal parts comic and psychedelic. It may not hold up when compared to Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, but if we measure it in contrast to, say, another Fast & Furious movie or Disney live-action remake, then this King Arthur is, at the very least, distinctive. In a cinematic calendar plotted out with prefab popcorn-movie products, Legend Of The Sword is —bad CGI fight sequences aside— almost a bespoke blockbuster.

Here, the dark ages are literally dark: skies clogged with clouds, cities with soot; scenes forever lurking in shadows, Ritchie favouring a palette of various shades of pewter. But, rather than some generic ‘dark’ reimagining, this grim pallor is offset with a colourful sense of character, comedy, and daring.

It’s rollicking and ridiculous from the get-go: opening with a pre-credits brouhaha in which an audience, unsuspecting, is thrown into the middle of a battle. There, for no known reason, giant magical elephants are stomping out walls, King Eric Bana’s eyes are glowing blue, and some cod-Tolkienist bad-guys are on the march. Chopper’s princely off-sider, Jude Law, is instantly fingered by his pale complexion, sullen demeanour, and suspicious nosebleed; and, sure enough, mid-melee he slews his brother, taking the dastardly-villain turn mere minutes in.

But, before this Young Pope has ascended to his ill-gotten throne, Bana, in the face of his imminent demise, dispatches his only begotten son in a Moses basket downriver. So, as Law rises to iron-gloved power, parallel action reveals something else is brewing in ol’ Londinium. It’s there that the dispatched bairn washes up on the fair shores of a local brothel; his Christ-like, sword-from-the-rock fate unknown to the whores and fishermen that are his flock. In an oh-so-Ritchie-esque montage set to a bangin’ big-beat score, we see our would-be hero rapidly grow, from towheaded ragamuffin to way-ripped Charlie Hunnam, with years compressed into cuts, a childhood filled with pickpocketry, gambling, and martial-arts training. It’s delirious, thrilling stuff, rattling along at hyper-caffeinated speed; the whole opening reel delivering nary a moment of ponderous, joyless, explanatory exposition.

Whilst haunted by Dark Knight dreams of his parents dying in front of his boyhood eyes, Hunnam has grown up to be streetwise and sarcastic, a veritable pimp who gads about with workin’-girls and geezers named things like Flat-Nosed Mike, Goosefat Bill, Backlack, and Kung-Fu George(!). Given Ritchie is at the helm, it’s no surprise that the film is loaded up with rapidfire oneliners, all ball-busting banter and lad-ish laughs; King Arthur played less as chosen-one myth, more as smirking crime caper.

Its Aryan-pin-up hero is way-handsome, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and gets about —in those moments he’s actually wearing a shirt— in an audacious white coat; because, hey, pimping ain’t easy. In contrast, Law is Goth as fuck: hair dyed the colour of eggplant, skin pale as porcelain; forever sulking, slumping in his throne, in leatherware outfits; his army of obedient Blackleg soldiers faceless minions in black iron masks.

Evil Jude’s a wet, cold, disdainful dandy; a panto villain ruling over his lands with a dictatorial disdain for the poor; waging a class-war on his own people. When he meets his eventual, inevitable, climactic demise, it will be at the hands of the drink-swilling, fun-loving, friend-making common-man: post-Roman England recast as a place of pleasing multinational diversity; Hunnam’s roundtable finding places for Kingsley Ben-Adir, Tom Wu, and Djimon Hounsou.

The sausage-party make-up of Hunnam’s band of merry, merry men has been posited as possible reason for the film’s failure, but this is a pretty amusing conclusion in a world in which The Avengers is the biggest cash-cow in the history of cinema, and the woman-hating homoerotic death-march The Lord Of The Rings became the bedrock of the New Zealand tourism industry. Corporeal women are sidelined, here, but Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey gets second-billing as black-eyed sorceress who can command the giant terror creatures of the Blacklands to do her bidding; and there are wild mythological sequences in which the film plunges underwater to chill with the mystical visions of the Lady Of The Lake, or Law must debate the Terms & Conditions of his deal-with-the-Devil blood-pact with a trio of Fates that’re half Sindel from Mortal Komabt, half-squid.

Whilst those magickal moments eventually give rise to a dreadful CGI Final Boss battle between Hunnam and a fire-spewing giant black skeleton, a couple of generic big-budget fight scenes hardly undermine the whole enterprise. In its best moments, King Arthur shows how much Ritchie has improved as a filmmaker since his overrated early days. Sure, he’s still hopelessly indebted to Tarantino —at one point, Law re-enacts the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs, nearly two millennia before anyone had heard Stuck In The Middle With You— but, following on from the brisk joys of the pleasingly-fluffy The Man From U.N.C.L.E., here Ritchie delivers more evidence he’s becoming an unlikely master of cross-cutting.

It may border on self-parody, but the various times in which Hunnam says something like “here’s how I think it’s going to go”, and plan-making, plans-in-action, and comic digressions get edited into an artful singular movement are fabulous cinematic sequences, marrying playful storytelling to dexterous editing. In instances like these —or when he sticks GoPros on the chests of his leggin’-it merry men, showing them hurtling down back-alleys in cut-up mania— Ritchie employs a spirited, playful, freewheelin’ approach that most blockbusters are too brand-managed, committee-thought, and conservative to even try. And, given King Arthur’s colossal financial failure, such moments of multiplex anarchy may not be seen again anytime soon.

20th century women

It might be time to induct the Mills Montage into the cinematic canon. As he did with his last film, 2010’s beautiful Beginners, Mike Mills fills his third picture, 20th Century Women, with montages; moving movements where his characters speak over archival photos, a taxonomy of items, and isolated moments from their lives. These sequences are used to break free from the strictures of screenwriting; to employ literary devices of omniscience and timelessness, to place fictional (or, at least, fictionalised) characters within the context of human history. They’re both distinctly personal and deeply universal, playful instances of meta-poetry that’re filled with temporality, sociology, loss, grief.

As with Beginners, there’s a likely strain of biography running through 20th Century Women. Here, it’s 1979 California, where a 15-year-old skater (Lucas Jade Zumann) is growing up with an idiosyncratic single mother (Annette Bening), who worries about the lack of a male role model. Her solution is to double down on female influences, charging a pair of boarders —Greta Gerwig’s punk-loving photographer, Elle Fanning’s self-destructive 17-year-old bad-girl— with taking on an extra-influential role in her son’s life. Soon, these Women are teaching our teen kid how to drink beer and smoke and talk to women; about menstruation and radical feminism; sneaking him into punk dives and loaning him Talking Heads records.

It’s familiar coming-of-age stuff, stripped of any coming-of-age clichés. Given the characters are drawn from its directors’ friends and family, and scenarios from his own experiences, there’s a pleasing quality of reality, and an even-better lack of male fantasy. Mills wrote the film as tribute to the formative women in his life, and the female characters he’s penned are complex and contradictory; equally loving and infuriating, charming and obnoxious. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet drama, but it’s in its montages —its Mills Montages— that 20th Century Women is at its most profound.

wilson

In Wilson —the third cinematic adaptation of graphic artist Daniel Clowes, following Ghost World and L.A. Confidential— an episodic comic becomes a kind of oddball picaresque. Here, the titular character, a cantankerous curmudgeon played with a raffish charm by Woody Harrelson, wanders from scene to scene, falling into all manner of misadventures. He’s forever saying, and doing, the wrong thing; the kind of guy who’ll sit down next to people on the bus, engage them in unwanted conversation, then be obnoxious, offensive.

The best thing about Wilson is the way the many characters that blow through its world are drawn with idiosyncrasy; instantly individual and non-generic. A great cast —Laura Dern, Lauren Weedman, Judy Greer, Cheryl Hines, David Warshofsky, Character Actress Margo Martindale— brings this human gallery to life; Clowes, as ever, drawn to drawing suburban blandeur, folksy queerness, the clutter in the American gutter.

But, given that this is a cinematic remake —and an American Indie, no less— the film can’t just be the assorted misadventures of a caustic jerk. So, here, a framing narrative arc is fashioned, in which Wilson —like Logan, Jack Reacher and Dominic Toretto of recent— learns that he has a kid he never knew about it! This is initially played for black-comic laughs, but director Craig Johnson, last seen making the middlebrow Sundance sadsack-siblings thing The Skeleton Twins, can’t resist moments of sentimentality; and a final turn towards redemption. Wilson’s anti-hero may be black-hearted, but the film itself is warm-hearted.

neruda

Alongside the Oscar-endorsed, genuinely-great Jackie, Neruda marks the other half of Pablo Larraín’s one-two assault on the tired tropes of the celebrity biopic. Here, the on-form filmmaker cuts out an episode in the life of its titular subject: in 1948, communism was outlawed in Chile, and people’s-poet Pablo Neruda disappeared into political exile. Dealing, as it does, with his time in the ‘underground’, Larraín is dealing with the unknown; summoning the imagined more than the factual. And, so, he and screenwriter Guillermo Calderón (having worked together on 2015’s paedophile-priest black comedy The Club), turn Neruda into a piece of meta-storytelling, in which the lines between reality, fantasy, poetry, and filmmaking all blur.

This is, often, conveyed by Gael García Bernal’s narration; the tiny star playing the pursuing police chief for whom Neruda’s capture turns from political gesture to personal obsession. “I’m the son of a courtesan, I’m the son of venereal disease,” he intones, at one point; evoking the poetic portrayal of even the most familiar filmic tics. Neruda leaves it open as to whether Bernal’s character really exists, or whether he’s a fiction invented by the writerly mind of a bored, bedraggled fugitive; a handsome detective stepped out of the pulp fiction pages, onto his trail.

As he did with Jackie, Larraín eschews traditional screenwriting rhythms for something more fluid, swimming through time —and edits— in an impressionist fashion. His directorial palette matches the modern approach: the distant past not portrayed in warm, mock-sepia hues, but painted in greys tinged slate and magenta, and dreary duck-egg blues. Here, Chilean history is no place for nostalgia, but dark, dystopian; the politics of Neruda both implicit and —as when Bernal says “my President has a boss: the President of the United States Of America— explicit.

after the storm

A deadbeat dad endeavours to get back in the good graces of his ex-wife, and nearly-estranged son, in this friendly family film from Hirokazu Koreeda. The 54-year-old Japanese filmmaker made his name with a couple of radical, formalist early films: 1998’s After Life, a conceptual vision of memory, cinema, and eternity; and 2001’s Distance, a post-Aum-Shinrikyo tone-poem about memory, grief, and culpability. But, save for 2009’s great Air Doll, Koreeda has made a run of films about family that’ve been growing increasingly middlebrow, even crowdpleasing.

The latest is After The Storm, which does little to arrest his descent into the sentimental. Here, Hiroshi Abe plays a one-time award-winning novelist turned corrupt private detective. Like his father before him, he’s a drunken gambler; unable to make child-support payments after blowing his cash at the track. But, lo, a big symbolic storm looms on the horizon, and soon dad, ex-wife, and son will all be under the one roof, seeking shelter from the rain. Koreeda is out to explore the ties that bind, how blood runs thicker than water, and how the life one leads is rarely the life they dreamt of. It’s warm, tender, bittersweet stuff; but harbours little cinematic daring or rough edges.