Myth Leading

Any attempted film version of the Arthurian legend needs to be wary of the well-trodden and well-parodied paths of previous efforts. "King Arthur", director Antoine Fuqua's entry is neither laughable nor a classic. It sort of sits there feeling under-researched and over-hyped. Really, Mr. Fuqua has made a B-movie with an A-list budget. Nothing about this envisioning of Arthur and his knights is particularly groundbreaking. Basically, instead of the fairytale to which we've become accustomed, David Franzoni's script presents the old familiar characters (Lancelot, Galahad, et al) as a sort of self-appointed brotherhood - a group of men who were made to guard a far off outpost in England and started their own fraternity. Gone are the values and nobility of past incarnations of these characters. In that way, the knights are more like Musketeers. The filmmakers have even dispensed with the famed love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. The problem is, the filmmakers haven't replaced the old situations with anything particularly new and interesting. Instead, it feels like an average medieval tale using familiar names.

Maybe I'm asking too much from the film. Maybe it just seemed like a good idea to take familiar material and turn it into a summer blockbuster, with the requisite share of gritty swordfighting and one particularly interesting battle on a frozen lake. Certainly, with the Jerry Bruckheimer pedigree, this can't be too far from the truth.

To Mr. Fuqua's credit, however, he does paint an appropriately messy picture of the period. And happily, in an age of "Lord of the Rings" CGI rip-offs, "Arthur" is largely filmed without the help of computer trickery. The castles and the extras are mostly actually there (since the film deals with battles between 200, instead of 20,000, it's doable).

The cast is lead by Clive Owen, adequate if never engaging as the man who would be the title. Mr. Owen is relentlessly charismatic, but this Arthur has been stripped of nearly every trait that defines him, to make him one of those reluctant heroes (a la Russell Crowe in "Gladiator") in which Mr. Franzoni specializes. Arthur's team is peopled with surprisingly fey, scrawny knights, with the exception of Bors ("Sexy Beast's" Ray Winstone), who probably comes closest to behaving like a medieval warrior. Speaking of anachronisms, the aptly-named Keira Knightley possesses neither the gravity nor the stature to create the warrior-woman that the filmmakers randomly chose to make Guenivere. And, sadly, the filmmakers have somehow relegated the character of Merlin (Stephan Dillane) to the background, making him an elder leader of the face-painted, wood-dwelling Woads. That's like filming "Lord of the Rings" and making Gandalf a Hobbit.

The best performance in the film, however, belongs to Stellan Skarsgård, who gives a gruff, lumbering, eccentric, positively Brando-esque performance as Cerdic, the leader of the Saxon horde. His every moment is interesting and he gives a glimpse of what this film could have been if it hadn't been so dumbed-down.

"King Arthur" is not a bad film, it's just exceedingly mediocre and another odd choice for Mr, Fuqua, who still has yet to live up to the promise of "Training Day". When Arthur proclaims that all Britons are united for a common cause, and the audience is left wondering "What cause is that?", Mr. Franzoni's script (full of klunkers like "A round table?! What evil is this?!!" and "What tomorrow brings…we can not know") finally reaches the Shakespearean heights to which it has aspired - it is full of sound and fury, signifying very little.