F.B. Pendergast

Saw King Arthur. This movie is all about good-looking guys in period outfits waving swords and a good-looking blue girl with a bow. Forget the legend. Forget history. Enjoy the beautiful people and the fighting and the killing.

Hot Damn. If I had the body for it, I'd be Gwennie for Halloween. Hell, I'd dress like that every day...er maybe not. That leather dark ages bikini might chafe and that would be a Bad Thing. As for Arthur, I'm not a big Clive Owen fan but I thought he looked like Bobby from Third Watch which ain't bad. He looked good. His knights looked good. They looked Hoo-ah! good. But even as eye-heroin as the knights were, Gwennie looked better.


I've seen people complain about Gwennie Warrior Briton, but the fact that she was the most fantastic looking thing in the movie makes me not care (and she had to be fan-freakin-tastic to distract me from Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Gambit, Gandalf...) I really do like the shift of female characters in action movies from Annoying Screaming Women In Immediate Danger of Assault to Girls Who Play Well With Boys And All Their Toys. Gwennie (yes I'm typing "Gwennie" because I don't know how to spell "Guinivere") played well with the boys in many ways, including that. She did things. She didn't wait for things to be done to her. No passive voice for Gwennie, but at the same time, no overly agressive and annoying assertions of grrrl power. She fit nicely beside Arthur and Lancelot, instead of under them. It's rather modern, but Geoffry of Monmouth and the rest are dead and can't sue.

So, historically-wise, legend-wise, this movie is...really not. But anyone going to a Jerry Bruckheimer summer action flick expecting to have history or literature explainamacated to them...well, gets what they deserve. And it gives people who like to complain about these things a chance to show off just how much they know about the original legend/history. My feeling is, sure, there are moments, where you go "Quoi?" but let the pretty people shoo those moments away.

Arthur, Lancelot, Gwennie, et.al. could've been renamed Quintus, Marius and Jennifer and the story would've trucked along just about the same. The point of it all was to have really attractive men dressed in attractive manly outfits galloping heroically in the fog swinging swords and firing arrows. With these attractive men is an attractive blue woman doing likewise (except for the manly part...and maybe the galloping part too). Standard action flick where you sit around and take bets on who's not making it out of the plot alive, (I broke even) and the one significant female character gets laid. And boy, does she have a smorgasbord of yowza pretty from which to choose.

Gotta say that the leader of the Saxons sounded like he came from the county of Saxonny called Oklahoma. Made me giggle.


SPOILER

I'm not a militant canonite. I usually don't care if this, that or the other thing from the original text and/or history is changed. But one thing did bug me. Lancelot isn't supposed to die. At least not without shagging Gwennie first.

I mean why go through all the trouble to cast Ioan "I'm not wearing underpants just for you!" Gruffudd and then serve him a big ol' plate of Saxon arrow instead of Arthur's blue girlfriend? Ioan looks such the dashing romantic hero, the film sets up Lancelot as a horndog, and Lancie and Gwennie make moo-moo eyes at each other in various states of her undress (actually she makes moo-moo eyes at almost everything with a penis, so we know she's up for it).

And then he dies. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Hey, at least $3.50 of my $6 (caught a matinee) was specifically for the sight of Ioan Gruffudd getting a little nookie. I want my nookie!

The demise of the non-nookied Lancelot has an upside, however, if you are Galahad. With Lancelot out of the way, Galahad captures the Holy Grail of Hottest Living Guy in Movie.

It's all about the pretty Roman/Briton/Samartian/Gothic/Pict/non-Saxon people.