King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a superhero stinker

IT WAS supposed to kick off a six-film franchise, but given how thoroughly silly it is, god help us all if that comes to pass.

KING Arthur is one of the oldest superheroes of western literature. First popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century, tales of Arthur’s derring-do has enthralled audiences for millennia.

And King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has all the hallmarks of a superhero origin story.

Mum and dad killed right before his eyes? Check. A vengeance mission against an evil usurper? Check. Extra-human powers obtained through mystical means? Check.

A bombastic blockbuster with no sense of subtlety? Most definitely check.

To be fair, Guy Ritchie has not built a career out of subtlety and nuance and we shouldn’t expect anything different from him now.

But King Arthur doesn’t have the fun vibrancy of the underrated Man From UNCLE or the irreverent freshness of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The closest comparison to an existing Ritchie movie is probably the Sherlock Holmes sequel — at times funny but mostly an unworkable mishmash.

The whole enterprise is underwhelming and lord help us all if this movie spins into the six-film franchise it was designed to set up — though that seems unlikely given the box office thumping it got in the US when it opened last weekend. King Arthur will have to rake in a lot of dough from international markets to make its $US175 million production budget back.

Like getting blood out of a ... oh, wait, wrong analogy.

This iteration of the legend of King Arthur starts off with Arthur’s (Charlie Hunnam) old man, Uther (Eric Bana), being taken down by Uther’s moustache-twirling and power hungry brother Vortigern (Jude Law).

Still a young tyke, Arthur sees his parents being killed but escapes down the river, drifting along in a raft. He’s found by a group of prostitutes who take him in and he’s raised in the brothel and on the mean streets of Londinium — Ritchie loves them mean streets. He grows up into an clever young man with a persuasive right-hook.

Meanwhile, evildoer Vortigern is up to no good. He’s amassing that evildoing power and the magical forces decide it’s time he’s stopped. Excalibur reveals itself and Vortigern, fearing the threat from the true “Born King”, decrees all men of a certain age be rounded up to try and pull the legendary sword out of the stone, hoping it’ll reveal his nephew.

King Joffrey is all grown up.

Part of the problem with this remake is the source material. It’s a story that’s been told before, in cartoon form and in live action, on TV and in film, from the glorious absurdity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the dreadful 2004 King Arthur which wasted a perfectly good actor in Clive Owen.

The Arthurian legend getting the Ritchie treatment is basically imposing the tales of yore onto a cocky crime/mobster movie with a bit of magic thrown in.

King Arthur is at its most entertaining when it’s embracing typical Ritchie-isms. The fight scenes, for the most part, are really fun and a chase through the streets of Londinium (there’s them mean streets again) is choreographed in a really compelling way. And this is a movie where the expository dialogue is the best part — the fast-paced banter with that idiosyncratic rhythm and cutaways.

But all that doesn’t rescue the movie from how underdeveloped the characters are — especially the female characters, who barely have names let alone personalities — or how thoroughly silly the bloated climax is. Or the fact the movie is sometimes so literally dark you can’t even make out what’s on the screen.

Ritchie may have had the ambition to breathe new life into an old story, but it’s hard to reinvent the wheel when you can’t get the wheel to balance.

Rating: 2/5

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is in cinemas from Thursday, May 18.

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Originally published as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a superhero stinker