King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword (12A)

ONE of British cinema’s great auteur directors takes on one of the land’s most enduring legends, King Arthur, and weaves magic and myth, sex and sorcery, love and treachery, knights in shining armour and a marvellous Merlin, to forge a memorable, mysterious epic.

Oh, hang on a minute. Wrong director. Wrong Arthur. That was John Boorman’s Excalibur, way back in 1981, perhaps the best film made of the Arthurian legend, and far superior to the film released this week. Guy Ritchie tempted fate by adding that word "legend" to his big-budget effort, but has produced a loud, laddish and dramatically lumpen effort that won’t last the month.

One of the problems with Ritchie is that we know what we’re going to get: spectacular, fussy visuals, mockney dialogue that may flourish down Ritchie’s local but doesn’t breathe in the air, along with ladles of machismo. It works well enough with his crime capers; and to be fair, Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr as the sleuth and Jude Law as Dr Watson, was great fun.

But with that film, not only did the director’s showboating suit Holmes’s own braggadocio, but he had two great performers handling the dialogue and, most importantly, he himself didn’t write the script.

Unfortunately, Ritchie does have a hand in writing King Arthur. And while a myth needs a combination of deference and interpretation, with a willingness to find a language to fit the tale, here Ritchie simply dresses the Camelot story in his own clothes. This is just another geezer picture, albeit with some period patina and the odd monster. It could never end well.

It starts with special effects spectacle, as a wizard leads an army of supernaturally giant elephants on Camelot. With Excalibur in hand, King Uther (Eric Bana) single-handedly sees them off, only to be undone by his traitorous brother Vortigern (Jude Law).

Ritchie then unleashes one of his signature tropes – the narrative shift in machine-gun speed – to show Uther’s orphaned son Arthur being raised in a brothel, grow up tough and commanding and eventually become a successful petty criminal in London’s underworld. Now Excalibur is discovered embedded in a stone in the river, and the megalomaniacal Vortigern sets out to find and kill the true king before he gets his hands on the blade.

Ritchie and his co-writers add some context about the relationship between humans and wizards, a stab at least at spinning creatively on the myth, albeit one that damagingly dispenses with Merlin and Morgana. The director’s more interested in fashioning Arthur – not just as a commoner returning for his regal birthright, but a beefed up, ducking and diving, jack the lad.

As a result, Charlie Hunnam’s gobby, cocky, testosterone-heavy Arthur isn’t likeable at all. His “crew”, who will eventually form the knights of the Round Table, don’t have a jot of charisma. The proliferation of working-class London patois is alienating. Jude Law, who really must miss Downey Jr, has little to do but glower. David Beckham shows up briefly as a Vortigern henchman, beneath some heavy prosthetic; it’s hard to say if he will fare better than Vinnie Jones. The only major female character, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s friendly sorceress, is the most interesting presence in the film.

More distressing than the dialogue, or the poor characterisation, or the macho posturing, is simply the fact that halfway through I forgot I was watching a film about King Arthur. There was just the dim perception of men running around, fighting, shouting, dying, amid the ever-present, percussive pounding of the soundtrack. And a huge desire for it to stop.

Colossal (15)

Given the poverty of ideas in King Arthur, and the general climate of sequels, prequels and franchised over-familiarity on offer these days, an almighty flag ought to be waved for Colossal. This is a film that is not only hugely original, defying easy categorisation – with equal parts comedy, drama, relationship movie and horror film – but it also dares to change tack as it's playing. It doesn’t always work, but it’s hugely welcome.

Anne Hathaway is Gloria, an out-of-work writer with a drink problem. When thrown out by her strait-laced and nagging boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens), she leaves New York and returns to her hometown, camping out in her family’s empty house. Gloria’s a mess, directionless, usually drunk. When she reacquaints with old school chum Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who conveniently owns a bar, it looks as though she’s going to stay in the same old groove.

But one morning she awakens from a drunken stupor to the news that is gripping the world: a giant monster has appeared out of nowhere in the South Korean capital Seoul, rampaging through the city and killing hundreds. Her initial horror at events turns to bafflement as she notices on TV that the monster scratches its head in exactly the same way – and in the same moments – as she does. She breaks into some dance moves, just to confirm that in some way she and a Godzilla-like creature on the other side of the world are connected.

For half an hour or so this breezes along like an indie comedy with a screw loose, bolstered by the kind of self-centred, flawed character that the under-rated Hathaway is very good at playing. But when a robot enters the fray in Seoul – revealing a different side to the seemingly mild-mannered Oscar – the film takes a much darker turn. And quite where it’s going to go is anyone’s guess.

Snatched (15)

Female buddy movie pairs comedy queens of the past (Goldie Hawn) and present (Amy Schumer) as mother and daughter who are kidnapped while on holiday in Ecuador, much to the kidnappers’ cost. Schumer has her moments, though her bad taste shtick wears thin and it’s mostly a laughter-free and pointless exercise.

The Secret Scripture (12A)

A strong cast, including Vanessa Redgrave, Rooney Mara and Eric Bana, can’t save this grim and dourly told story about a young woman’s persecution in Ireland in the 1940s, at the hands of both the IRA and a Catholic priest.