July 8-14, 2004

movies

All Hail the Queen

GUINNER TAKE ALL: Keira Knightley faces her foes.

Keira Knightley's Guinevere outshoots King Arthur.

King Arthur

by Cindy Fuchs

Tops among the numerous absurdities in King Arthur is Keira Knightley's appearance in what might best be described as elfin gear. Her route to this particular appearance coincides with a tremendous battlefield climax where she shoots her arrows — plain and fiery — alongside a large company of similarly garbed and armed fellow insurgents.

As about-to-be Queen Guinevere, Knightley is a game and gallant lass, just one revisionist element in this Jerry Bruckheimer-ized version of the Knights of the Round Table. Opening with an epigraph that explains it draws from "new" information concerning Arthur, that is, "the untold true story that inspired the legend," the movie proceeds to trample all over previous Hollywood and traditional-legend incarnations, turning everyone into an action hero — including lovely Guinevere, whom Arthur finds inside a walled-up dungeon, where she's been "tortured with machines" and is now tended by twitchy monks who eagerly await her death by some vague judgment on her sinfulness.

Arthur (mournful Clive Owen) has a soft spot for abuse victims. You know this from narration by Ioan Gruffudd's Lancelot (which ends up not making much sense, given his own fate in this saga) that the knights are all conscripts, picked up as children and trained to fight in support of Rome's imperialist land-grabbing. Some 15 years later, in A.D. 452, as opposed to the usually cited medieval times, the renowned Sarmatian warriors are eagerly anticipating their promised freedom when sniffy Italian Bishop Germanius (Ivano Marescotti) comes up with one more indentured task, namely, fetch the pope's favorite nephew, Alecto (Lorenzo De Angelis), from his home in the Saxon-besieged North.

The pagan knights' anger at this stop-loss tactic is exacerbated by their perception that the Christian-inclined Arthur is selling them out for a God who doesn't look after them. Worse, the empire is, in fact, cutting and running, leaving Britain (the "land" to which the knights have dedicated their violent services) to Saxons. Tetchy at first, the knights — including lackluster Lancelot, boisterous Bors (Ray Winstone), dreary Gawain (Joel Edgerton) and Tristan (Mads Mikkelson), who travels with a mysterious and apparently useless hawk — eventually accept Arthur's self-admittedly schizy allegiances, to his British heritage as well as the Romans (his "other" name is Arturius). They're mates, after a fashion, and share with their chief a long history of combat and mayhem, all in the name of (their) freedom, of course.

Their current enemies, the hordes of Saxons, first appear knotty haired and lurching about, flames and smoke in the background, raping and pillaging their most recent conquests. Even less differentiated than the knights (who are decidedly uncolorful), the Saxons are unquestioningly devoted to their superiors, the glowering Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård) and his ornery, out-to-prove-himself son Cynric (Til Schweiger). This absolute loyalty, shown by their Braveheartish chest-pounding and feet-stomping, might have something to do with the fact that the Cerdic kills anyone who thinks about disobeying him.

Arthur is more ambivalent about his leadership, because he's not a big believer in supreme privilege, whether conferred by God or some other force. Alternately fretful (because Romans like the bishop take their administrative rule as God-given), guilty and philosophical, he insists on leading his men into battle, such that he might suffer any ill effects along with them (plus there's the thrill of the melee thing, already established in Gladiator and the Lord of the Rings movies).

At the same time, this Arthur is a liberal do-gooder, deciding that he not only needs to free the serfs he finds being abused by Alecto's tyrannical dad (including the aforementioned Guinevere), but also take them along with him. "Freedom is yours by rights," he announces. The other knights see the problem with this idea immediately; suddenly their crew is encumbered by injured slowpokes. At this point, the film turns almost step-for-step into another version of Fuqua's last film, Tears of the Sun, in which a U.S. Special Ops commander (Bruce Willis), inspired by a beautiful doctor (Monica Bellucci), saves a bedraggled group of Nigerian refugees.

The primary differences between these plots — in which interloping heroes learn humility and sacrifice from plaintive natives — are Arthur's survival (he is, after all, going to be king) and the girl's contributions. Where the doctor was game, she was not a fighter by training; Guinevere, recalling Knightley's wannabe pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, is remarkably fierce. For the final battle with the Saxons, she brings in her own people, a gnarly, living-off-the-land band led by non-magician Merlin (Stephen Dillane) and prone to wear blue body paint and swirlies on their faces when wartime comes.

Guinevere looks fabulous in her outfit, which approximates the one Milla Jovovich wore in The Fifth Element (another degree of Bruce Willis), but with animal hides. She also looks awfully vulnerable — Bruckheimer says research shows the woodsy folk, Amazonian types called the Picts, would have been fighting naked in the historical fifth century — especially compared with the chain-mailed, horseback-riding, excessively armed knights. Still, she's the movie's liveliest creature, perhaps warranting her own Elektralike spin-off. Guinevere Strikes Back?

King Arthur Directed by Antoine Fuqua. A Touchstone release. Now playing at area theaters.