Clip It: Each day, Jon Davis looks at the world of trailers, featurettes, and clips and puts it all in perspective.
Ah, Camelot! A time for GoPro cameras and quick cut editing, when hip meta storytelling was in vogue and well timed sarcasm was the bantering style of the day. Guy Ritchie has brought his trendy brand of filmmaking to the King Arthur legend. Ugh.
Sometimes you have to let a thing be a thing. Hold on. Record scratch. Let's me explain that. (I can do to this too, Guy Ritchie!) Take Captain America. Not a cool character, but so what? It was writer Mark Waid's comic book run that sold me on him. What I enjoyed was that Mark Waid didn't try to make the character something that he wasn't. He didn't make Captain America talk like a Quentin Tarantino character. He didn't shim sham us with non-linear storytelling tricks. What he did instead was embrace what works about the good Captain, and his love for the character popped off the page, and that's what made it fun. The movies followed that lead.
I wasn't a big fan of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes because it felt like he didn't trust the character was interesting on his own without jazzing him up and turning him into an action hero. Detective fiction became pyrotechnics, and Sherlock Holmes was barely recognizable. It seems like he's talking the same approach here. But If I want a cookie, I will eat a cookie. And if I want a cracker, I will eat a cracker. What I don't want is a cookie-flavored cracker. Also, I want to hear what Charlie Hunnam really sounds like. Stop giving him an accent, stop crowding him, let the sexy man breathe!
Obviously a lot of people like what Guy Ritchie does. I don't know about this one. It looks like 300 by way of Sucker Punch. I hope the movie proves me wrong. If this is more changing the intent of a character and switching up a genre to make it “cool”, then it's not for me.