King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

The new King Arthur may have some charisma and flair, but he has absolutely no style or refinement. You'll want to talk about this story with your mates in some seedy "pub" on the outskirts of London, that's about as much character as this film gets. A muddle of rock hits, confusing editing, dull PG13 CGI action scenes and a boring 130 minutes. Ritchie may be his own man again, with a distinctive and very bold style, but this legend doesn't need to be made any other way. (05/12/2017)

I have to give it to Guy Ritchie – his movies have style. Whatever he films ends up fantastic. But I can’t shake the feeling that some of the scenes tend to go over the top. The beginning was amazing. The very first scene was gripping, it tells Arthur’s story since early childhood until the age where the rest of the story begins. It’s original, quick, entertaining… for about an hour. Then the ideas thin out and the whole thing gets repetitive. That’s when it loses its magic and becomes a classic Guy Ritchie movie. I can’t say he’s not being inventive, but my initial excitement has quickly grown cold. And even though I admire the effort to shoot a King Arthur fantasy from a different angle, I still couldn’t piece the story together and all I could do was to watch some CGI hocus pocus. (08/02/2018)

I try to avoid movies that have the words Arthur or Excalibur in the title because they traditionally disappoint me. I made an exception this time and I can’t say I’m happy about it. The film stopped being interesting to me before the opening credits when I found out that England was riddled with giant elephants and the defense of Camelot was led by an actual dark knight instead of a king. Although I watched it to the end, I couldn't get over the disgust I felt at the beginning. (08/31/2017)

Go have fun, here's 175 million! And Guy Ritchie indeed had his fun. An audiovisual hedonist's paradise. Thirty-five years ago, Boorman was shitting out fabulous processed meals of Orff, double-bladed axes, and a mighty fistful of armor. Now it’s Ritchie shitting them out in his concept of post-modern fantasy (the costumes alone, or the way they talk), helped along by killer editing, unscrupulous and megalomaniacal CGI, complete resignation to the formal standards of the "great glorious epic", and presenting a coked-up ride where anything goes and, except for rare moments, there’s never any time to think about why what's happening is actually happening. It cleverly intersperses prologues to the individual scenes with scenes like ("Let’s take him to the Dark Land." "No way!" – "Welcome to the Dark Land."), for example, so we're not rocking the usual boat of relax-relax-relax-action, but constantly riding the Shikansen to the God of War finish. The soundtrack, the greatest ride since Mad Max, accompanies this perfectly, at times seizing the reins of the entire experience, and there won’t be a shortage of joggers breaking their necks when they pop it into their headphones. Add to that, here we have Arthur running around in sped-up shots from which the frames are cut, characters wearing an Aronofsky-esque first-person steadycam on their bodies, slowing down, stopping, the camera whirls around like its life depended on it, pans, macros, micros, Malá Fatra, Veľká Fatra, you name it. Too bad it doesn't earn its keep, because this is not a film you'll do much relaxing with. PS: Please nominate the protagonist's coming of age montage for the Nobel Prize for editing. (05/16/2017)

A great fantasy blast that honors the Arthurian legend, but at the same time does absolutely whatever it wants with it. It adds monsters, it shows Arthur as a gangster from London (Londinia, in fact), thanks to Ritchie's direction and Pemberton's great music, it's extremely polished and stylish, and thanks to the actors it's likeable as hell... And above all, it is also quite funny, which the trailers unfortunately concealed, God knows why. Don't say you expected an ordinary film from Guy Ritchie. (05/15/2017)