The film’s a bit of a mess. I get that Ritchie has tried to bring something of his smart arse mockney gangsterness to the legend of Arthur, but his gangster films only work because his characters are so exaggerated, and he’s only able to turn the dials up on everything because it’s still grounded in something real.
This just ends up feeling disjointed, like two trains running on separate tracks, hopping from one train to the other repeatedly but servicing neither.
This kind of genre blending can work. Rian Johnson does film noir in a high school Brick (2005), and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s does a detective story in a medieval monastery in Name of the Rose (1986).
There’s a way to do the Arthurian legend as a gangster film, something that’s better than just grafting on a few scenes of mockney talking, onto a poor version of Lord of the Rings (2001-2003).
Darrin // Nightingale 