King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword

A Mage A Day Helps
You Work, Rest and Play

King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword
USA 2017 Directed by Guy Ritchie
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Any similarities between this movie and the legend of King Arthur are purely coincidental.

Remember that famous moment in Arthurian legend where giant, armoured elephants taller than a couple of skyscrapers attack Camelot with giant, spiky clubs they hold in their trunks? Yeah, me neither. Yet... here they are.

I’m not a fan of gangster cinema but the few films by Guy Ritchie I’ve actually seen - the two Sherlock Holmes films and The Man From UNCLE reboot (reviewed here)- were pretty cool movies, as far as I’m concerned. However, when I saw a trailer for King Arthur - Legend of the Sword a month or so ago it looked absolutely horrendous and I made a decision, there and then, to trust my instincts and stay away from the movie. However, I then found out that Daniel Pemberton was re-teaming with Ritchie after his fantastic score for The Man From UNCLE and, furthermore, while King Arthur - Legend of the Sword was taking a critical drubbing, Pemberton’s score was being singled out as the best thing about the movie and was doing very well in the Amazon music charts (and not just the soundtrack part of it). Since I also knew there was already a CD release of this score... well, I had to go and see this after all. And, I must say, as far as Pemberton’s score goes, at least... I wasn’t disappointed.

To be fair to Ritchie and his excellent cast and crew... the trailer for the film makes it look much less appetizing than it actually is. King Arthur - Legend of the Sword is actually a huge slice of fun and its greatest tragedy, in my eyes, is that it looks like it had a truly great movie waiting in the wings in some alternate cut. However, it’s not without its huge problems and I think the final edit probably hinders the movie way more than it should.

The great thing about this film, the primary strength, is its cast. They’re all very good. Charlie Hunnam is very likable as Arthur, Jude Law makes an excellent villain in King Vortigern, Eric Bana is excellent as Uther Pendragon (for the few minutes he’s in it), British treasure Neil Maskell is wonderful as the likeable guy who ends up as motivation fodder at a critical point in the story and the Merlin substitute, played here as a female mage by Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, who I last saw in the unbelievably cool I Origins (reviewed here) has absolutely the most amazing screen presence in this film. Even Mr. Posh Spice gets a halfway decent moment in the proceedings.

The dialogue isn’t bad either and the opening ten minutes, pre-credits, and the credits themselves are very strong sequences. Pre-credits is the big ‘elephant’ scene I mentioned above, as Uther saves everybody from the evil attacking Camelot before heading to meet his own fate in the betrayal of a close friend and the titles themselves play out over Arthur growing up in a brothel and becoming ‘street savvy’ in Londinium. Unfortunately, this is all the strongest stuff in the movie and, as much as I admired Ritchie’s technique and the way in which he uses the syntax of splicing film to create a finished result, I really think it goes into overdrive too quickly and too long here.

Oh, and the music... as I said before, Daniel Pemberton’s score is absolutely top notch and I expect to see it listed in my top five scores at the end of the year. Truly astonishing work and this guy is definitely one to watch. I’ll probably never watch this movie again in my life but the CD soundtrack is going to be on my turntable for months, when it arrives, I’m pretty sure of that.

So, okay... lets talk about the two things I think let the film down a little.

This doesn’t stick to Arthurian legend at all. There’s no Merlin or Morgan Le Fey... although I’m sure that in the subsequent films that Ritchie was planning on releasing before this flopped big time at the box office, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s unnamed mage character would have taken on one of those two mantles. There’s no Guinevere, no Lancelot and other bits of legend are played with fairly hard so they almost become unrecognisable. Also, this is set in a time, according to the script, when magicians were plentiful and roamed side-by-side with normal people... so we have, to an extent, fantastical elements not uncommon in something you might expect in the heroic fantasy genre. That being said, I’ve no idea why giant snakes were so prominent unless Ritchie loved the John Milius version of Conan The Barbarian as much as I did because some of the magical sequences seem to be a little at odds with common sense or follow through here.

Another main difference is that King Arthur, once he’s learned how to wield Excalibur without fainting and lapsing into unconsciousness, can do magic stuff himself... drawing on power from his sword in a similar manner to the way Michael Moorcock’s famous character Elric Of Melnibone gains power from his black, soul sucking sword Stormbringer. So, you know... big changes to Arthurian legend there. Alfred Tennyson might be twirling poetically in his grave at this point.

The other thing is Ritchie’s cinematic language here. Remember those scenes in Soderbergh’s The Limey where he cuts between two different scenes of the same two people to make up one conversation? Well Ritchie does it all the time and while I have observed this trait in him before and while he always, here included, does it very well... using short edits of alternate situations and also just generally cross-cutting between scenes to tell the story... here he seems to be doing it without any thought as to how the abundance of such an approach affects the whole piece. Like he and the editor were on some kind of really wonderful drug while cutting this movie and... it works great as a means to an end but I wish he’d have tempered it back because, honestly, it really gets tiring after just five minutes, let alone a whole movie's worth of fast cutting. Seriously, was there any shot in this film held for more than a few seconds? This really is MTV generation editing taken to a point way farther than it maybe should have been allowed to get.

You need some pauses...

If you look at some of the most iconic action movies of all time coming from the likes of Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone or even Steven Spielberg, one of the things you’ll notice straight away after you’ve seen just a few is that they are all about the pausing and build up between action sequences. You make the action moments stand out by pitching them against something which anticipates and teases those sequences. In this film, however, even the long dialogue scenes, of which there are many, are cut together like hard hitting action scenes so, when the three or four action sequences do come along, quite apart from being hard to follow, they are diluted and lose literally all impact because they have nothing to be seen in contrast to. Now it’s obvious from this that Ritchie has the coverage on the various scenes because he keeps cutting back to them.... so I wish he’d have just ramped down from the ferocious editing in some of those sequences a little more and let them play out without chopping about so much because, overall, the film gradually wears you down to a point where the final battles feel like a complete anticlimax and you really do feel like the movie just needs to end soon, to be honest.

And it’s such a shame because Ritchie is so obviously a great director and I wish he would have just reeled himself in a bit because I’m sure, with the footage he already has, this could have been a truly groovy and successful movie. However, it isn’t... the people have spoken with their wallets and, alas, it’s time to move on from this somewhat unique take on King Arthur and his Merry Men. No wait, that’s not right. Although it does seem like the film is trying to be more Robin Hood with magic party tricks and less King Arthur at some points.

So... you know what. If you’ve got nothing better to do one evening, I’d still say go and have a look at King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword because, frankly, you can learn from and be somewhat entertained by a spectacular failure as you can from a film which totally gets everything right. It’s not a great film but it’s not without its moments and, over and above all the mess that this movie is, it’s still got some kick ass, killer music by Pemberton which is really worth the price of admission. The movie is a bit of a write off, to be sure but... there are things work salvaging from the wreckage if you feel you’ve got the time.

Deliver Us From Evil

Performance Evil-uation

Deliver Us From Evil
2014 USA
Directed by Scott Derrickson
UK Cinema release print.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Scott Derrickson as a director. On the one hand he directed Sinister (reviewed here), which is not a film I had a great deal of good things to say about, although I did try and defend certain aspects of it as well as I could, considering some of the negative points I mentioned in that review. However, you’ve also got to remember that this is the same director who gave us, The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, one of the better of the “exorcism” films made in recent years. A very well made piece of horror/courtroom cinema, if you ever get the chance to take a look at it.

I had no preconceptions about Deliver Us From Evil going in. I can’t remember if I’d seen a trailer for it or not, it could be any of a number of horror movie trailers doing the rounds in the last couple of months, but I figured I would go and take a look at it because it didn’t look like it was a remake of anything and so it scored points with me straight away on that count.

The film is based on the true life account of a cop, Ralph Sarchie, who is played by Eric Bana in the movie and it details his encounters with supernatural forces dealing with demonic possession. He is at the start of the movie, of course, cynical of such things himself but when the things he sees and encounters as a cop on the beat become less and less explainable, he “teams up”, so to speak, with a priest, Mendoza, played by Édgar Ramírez, who is able to guide him and help him in a series of connected cases which involve demonic possession and which ultimately lead straight back to Sarchie and his family. Sarchie’s “radar” at finding troubling incidents on the beat is revealed as a possible “gift” of the supernatural... but it also acts like a magnet to demonic entities who are attracted to this talent.

The film starts off pretty strong, with an opening sequence which takes place in Iraq and which is relevant to pretty much all the events that happen later in the movie. I’m happy to say it keeps up the pacing and is an interesting movie throughout. Now how successful it is depends on your definition of what you look for in a good movie as opposed to a good horror movie. Let me explain that a little...

You’ve got two very strong male leads, A list stars, with Eric Bana and Édgar Ramírez and they’re not really actors you would associate with the horror genre. They both do an excellent job in this, as do all the supporting cast and, although there’s a hell of a lot of hand held shaky camera throughout the film, it actually in some ways feels like a 1970s movie and, frankly, that’s a strength. Yes, I know it’s actually set in 2013 but what I mean to say is the acting style and delivery of the lines feels like something made in Hollywood back when great American movies were being made and this is a pretty good compliment to pay to any movie in my book.

However... the flip side of that is that, although the film does maintain a certain amount of tension and suspense throughout the picture, I wouldn’t actually call this a scary movie... so in regards to certain ingredients of this kind of entertainment I would say it downplays one of the elements somewhat. But this is not a bad thing either.... some of the classic horror films of all time, such as Bride Of Frankenstein or Creature From The Black Lagoon are not , in actual fact, scary and so this shouldn’t necessarily be the barometer by which you judge this movie, in all honesty. Part of that, I think, is to do with the way the camera cuts to different points of view in various sequences... the ones which are trying to be scary... when it maybe needed to stick to something resembling point of view in those moments.

However, although it may not be a scary film it is, certainly, a pretty great one and I, like all people, truly appreciate a well made movie. I think this movie is one of the ones I would like to nominate as one of my “comfort horror movies”... that is to say, horror films you can relax with and have on when you want to do some thinking with a little bit of distraction coming from the screen. It is something I would like to watch again on a number of occasions and I’ll certainly be grabbing the blu ray of it when it comes down in the sales.

Of course, I may be a bit harsh in regards to the amount of scares and sustainable tension packed within the film... which felt a little more like a police procedural movie at times (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Different things scare different people and you really can’t go that wrong when you’ve got one of the great modern composers, Christopher Young, turning in one of his trademark horror scores. So the best, sure fire way to find out if this is your kind of horror movie is, of course, to go see it for yourself. I’ve certainly got no doubts about recommending it to anyone because it’s a well made, entertaining piece of cinema which should hold your interest throughout. Whether you happen to find it scary or not is just an extra cherry on an already tasty cake. Miss this one at your peril.

Hanna

Hanna, Solo

Hanna US 2011

Directed by Joe Wright

Playing at cinemas now.

Caution: There are NO real spoilers on this one but I should probably warn you up front that... if you don’t like the current trend for filming absolutely everything in shades of blue and orange, you might want to give this movie a miss... I’d advise you not to though... it’s really excellent.

Hanna tells the story of a sixteen year old girl called... um... Hanna (played absolutely impeccably by Saoirse Ronan) who has been living in the snowy wilderness with her guardian, Erik (thoughtfully played by Eric Bana), for the majority of her life. She has been leading a life of hardship and lacking in the normal luxuries that you and I take for granted (like the beauty of music) and Erik has been training her in all the essential skills of survival and combat for the day when she becomes, like Erik, A Jason Bourne-like killing machine in order to invade the civilised world and kill Marissa (the always wonderful Cate Blanchett) who was the woman who killed Hanna’s mother when she was just a little girl.

That’s your basic set up and that’s as much as I’m going to tell you about specific elements of the story. There’s not a lot you won’t see coming but that doesn’t really matter on this particular piece of action-thriller celluloid. It’s more about the journey of one person and the peripheral damage created by her passing through the lives of others. Friends and foes alike do tend to get pretty f*cked up in her wake... often without her even noticing this unfortunate trend.

You might say that this movie is a patchwork quilt of Nikita and The Bourne Identity and there are certainly elements of those movies to be found in Hanna. Cate Blanchett is very much a more “hands on” version of the Brian Cox character in those movies and if she comes across as a little bit of a broad villain, much as she did in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I think she can be forgiven this since the genre elements used to tell the story almost beg for the kind of larger-than-life characterisation that she chooses to inject into this character. The coldness behind her eyes is almost freezing.

And coldness is almost a key motif for the movie as a whole. The film starts off in a sequence in the snow with Hanna hunting a deer and the rest of the film seems to take this sequence as a template of sorts with absolutely beautiful and very cleanly composed cinematography (it looks like something directed by either Kieslowski or Hartley) which mostly uses frosty shades of blue or cooled down oranges or a combination of both on screen sometimes... such as when Hanna is escaping her captors/pursuers through an almost maze like building in dull, neutralised colours but wearing cool orange clothing which, although quite toned down in itself, makes for a nice contrast with her immediate environment without warming the shots up too much and retaining that theme of frostiness throughout the whole movie. Even when, in some sequences, some greens and reds and yellows are brought into the general mix to “rock the palette” as it were, the overall effect is still mostly one of stark neutrality and this is also echoed in the attitudes of the main characters throughout the course of the movie.

I’ve talked about Cate Blanchett’s steely, cold exterior which she uses to highlight the professional ruthlessness of her character... this also is to be found in Eric Bana’s character in a lot of the sequences and he only really warms up when he’s sharing screen-time with the title character.

The real contrast in tone is, perhaps, Hannah herself, who is forced to fly solo and make her own way in the world... she too has a very frosty exterior but it clearly holds a very warm, beating heart and it becomes apparent as Hanna “makes friends” that the ice and frost in her killing-machine exterior is as much about the realities of her hermit like existence and detachment from a social milieu more than anything else. And there are some beautiful sequences which highlight the chaos, confusion and adrenalin filled underside of her character, one which involves her freaking out over the abundance of electrically powered consumer items and another as she is escaping her would be captors/killers... where the camerawork and editing style just go completely mad... as though the camera-eye is just giving up for a moment on the cleanliness and coolness of the mise-en-scene and just throwing its hands up in the air to give the viewer a crazy collage of aggressively shifting visual psychedelic riffs on the films environment... with the camera actually spiralling about 360º in one instance. This is a actually a very dynamic film where the tension and release nature of the atmosphere is very much controlled but can also “get rowdy” on the viewer very quickly if it needs to push an emotional point.

The tension and suspense is wrought from every shot, ably supported by a likeable score composed by some people called The Chemical Brothers (?), but these sequences of tension are regularly released by the odd burst of broad humour or an orgy of violent action cinema not dissimilar to anything Besson has been producing over the last few years. This is a film which will pull you in and not let you go until it’s created a smorgasbord of emotional highs and lows by pitching the intensly grim plot of the movie against a sense of playfulness and beauty... whether you like this film or not, you’re certainly unlikely to be bored by it.

And then there’s the ending. This film has one of those perfect endings that rarely come up. Without giving anything away there’s a beautiful symmetry to this film which is derived from the set up in a way that means you will know, roughly 3 or 4 minutes before it happens, what both the last line and the last “shot” of this film will be. There’s a poetic quality to the end sequence and a haunting premonition of events in a tangible form which informs the audience of the metaphor it’s about to witness... the film just has to end this way... and it does.

I’m not going to say anymore on this one right now except that if you like cinema in general then Hanna kind of has the feel of a French action thriller filtered through a Polish camera lens and an American Independent sensibility while still, I suspect, playing for a mass audience. And that’s probably not a bad thing to aim for really... all things considered.