King Arthur: Legend of the Sword puts an accent on the silly: review

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Starring Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Aiden Gillen and Eric Bana. Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. Opens Friday at major theatres. 126 minutes. 14A

Oi! What’s Guy Ritchie gone and done with King Arfur, then?

In King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, he’s done another Sherlock Holmes to British legend, he has.

He’s turned Arfur — Arthur, I mean — into a Cockney combo of Oliver Twist and Artful Dodger, set in the 8th century or thereabouts. Played by Charlie Hunnam, who was a biker in TV’s Sons of Anarchy, he’s a street urchin raised in a brothel in Londinum, which is what they called London before they learned how to spell.

And a right rounder he is, mixing it up at every chance. Hunnam is up to the task, he really is, all kitted out in a flash shearling coat, although he is rather a serious bloke.

Mind you, Arthur doesn’t know yet that he’s got royal blood in him. He escaped as a tot out of Camelot when his evil uncle Vortigern (Jude Law) stole the rightful throne from Arthur’s dad Uther (Eric Bana).

Vortigern took the jam outta Arthur’s doughnut, if I may quote Tommy from Snatch, an earlier Ritchie film that actually made sense with its Cockney characters, after a fashion.

Listen, mate, I’m not saying Ritchie is taking the piss here. If people can mess about with Shakespeare, can’t Ritchie have a go at King Arthur, who is merely fictional, is he not? And who does Cockney capers better than Guy Ritchie?

But he goes too far. If I may quote another Charlie, the one in The Italian Job played by the great Cockney actor Michael Caine, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword blows it all up, as director Ritchie shares the scriptwriting blame with Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold.

It’s got bloody great elephants and giant snakes, which weren’t living in Britain in the 8th century, last time I checked. It’s also got weird witches wrapped around some kind of octopus in a subterranean lake, an idea that looks like it was nicked from Macbeth or maybe Mar-a-Lago.

Arthur larks about with his “lads” — that would be his future Knights of the Round table, no less — who have colourful names like Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou), Wet Stick (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Back Lack (Neil Maskell), Chinese George (Tom Wu) and, er, Bill (Game of Thrones’ Aiden Gillen).

Make no mistake, this is a very much a lad’s movie, as most Guy Ritchie pictures are. Although there is this wizard bird named Mage (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), who looks more like a Marion to me.

What really frosts my pumpkin, if I may say so, is that after wading through about an hour of scattershot edits and on-the-fly plot descriptions set to a sledgehammer score, we finally get down to the task at hand: getting Arthur to pull his magic sword Excalibur out of the bleedin’ stone and get on with being a king, smiting foes and all that.

And when he does so, he damn nears faints from the exertion, he does.

What kind of King Arthur is that? The kind we saw in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when Graham Chapman’s Arthur is informed by Michael Palin’s aggrieved Cockney peasant, referring to another version of Arthurian legend, that the weapon doesn’t make the man.

“You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you,” the peasant says, and I couldn’t agree more, mate.

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