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	King Arthur
	Antoine Fuqua Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Ioan Gruffudd, Stellan Skarsgård, Ray Winstone, Stephen Dillane, Hugh Dancy, Til Schweiger, Mads Mikkelsen, Ray Stevenson, Joel Edgerton 2004		Frittering away a blue-ribbon international cast, "King Arthur" — trumpeted as the true story — is a lumbering hack at making the Arthurian legend "Braveheart"-ier. Verily, it's another product off blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer's assembly line. The film's director, Antoine Fuqua, who earned props for the punchy inner-city crime drama "Training Day," was an odd choice to impose someone's idea of historical accuracy on a timeless tale of chivalry and romance. His "King Arthur," filled with tiresome battle scenes, lacks grandeur. Clive Owen has the proper noble, unflinching vibe as Arthur, dutiful half-British/half-Roman leader of the most feared brigade of knights in antiquity. UK starlet Keira Knightley is sleek and acrobatic as a grrl-power version of Guinevere — an arrow-shooting, sword-swinging match for any man, not the elegant damsel who would be queen. (In this revision, she's one of the Picts, a scraggly-haired blue-tattooed crew of warriors led by an unmagical Merlin.) But the knights are thinly drawn, and there's scant hint of the classic love triangle with Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd), Guinevere and Arthur. As evil Saxon leaders, Denmark's Stellan Skarsgård and Germany's Til Schweiger camp it up. And the cast's myriad accents — English, Danish, Welsh, German, Italian — are inconsistent; a meeting of the Round Table sounds like a European Union summit.


	Wednesday, December 18, 2024





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