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Take the battle scenes from Lord of the Rings, the underlying plot of Gladiator, and mix in a dash of Robin Hood, and what do you have?

King Arthur, which goes on general release at the end of the month.

Oh, and get Clive Owen to play the lead, too, just to spoil it. He was terrible. It doesn’t matter if he’s happy, excited, angry (lots of that) or upset (plenty of angst here) - he’s always got the same expressionless face, and flat, bored voice. I am sure there must have been an autocue strapped to the front of the camera so he could read off his lines.

So, what was I expecting? It was a Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun) retelling of British history, so it was going to be heavy on the drama, but even the battle scenes, of which there are really only two, were surrounded by acres of dull waffle. Fortunately, when they came, they were well worth the wait, and the one on the frozen lake, which the press invite described as ‘one of the great cinematic fight scenes of all times’ was fairly edge-of-your-seat. It wouldn’t go so far as agreeing with that quote, but it certainly had me thinking that finally we were seeing something we’d not seen on film before.

But ultimately it’s been done by others before, and it’s been done by others better. Lord of the Rings had bigger battle scenes, and Gladiator did the whole ‘fight for your freedom’ lark back in 2000 with far more panache.

A more dynamic leading man may have been able to carry it off, but it seems even Clive Owen realised he’d heard it all somewhere before, but not until the first day of shooting, by which time the contract was signed and it was all too late.

So the only thing he could do, was plod through.

Which he did.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2004 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.