How the hell did this end up the first great King Arthur movie in almost 3 decades?!
I can’t recall the last time a January theatrical release flabbergasted
me with this much quality tht wasn’t a “Paddington” movie since the pleasant
surprise of “Chronicle” almost 7 years ago.
“The Kid Who Would Be King” comes to us courtesy of Joe
Cornish, director of the painfully underrated “Attack the Block,” which is worth
watching on its own merits beyond the kick of hindsight due to featuring John
Boyega and Jodie Whitaker before they became contributors to Sci-Fi iconography.
The tale pitched by the trailer of bullied geek Alexander
Elliott’s discovery of Excalibur and his rise to the call of heroism to face
the evil’s unleashed upon the world by an eternal feud between Merlin and
Morgana isn’t quite inaccurate but doesn’t really encompass the charm of the
feature itself.
“The Kid Who Would Be King” is definitely a retro love
letter to fantasy kids faire from 2 to 3 decades past, wrapped in the
perspective of its audience who thinks reputations and avoiding parental
groundings is more challenging than saving the world. What works so exceedingly
well about it is the Cornish’s sincere commitment to the material and the heart
and humanity he manages to inject it with similarly to how he pulled with “Attack
the Block’s” revisionist take on Spielberg-esque group of misfit kids band
together stories.
The structure is familiar but the turns it takes are clever
and relatable as these kids feel less like archetypes and more like real kids
dealing with real problems.
Even the bullies receive a believable degree of dimension
that offers a brilliant tie into Arthurian chivalric themes about how hard it
is to be the better person you know you’re capable of being in a modern
connected world that’s consistently reporting doom and gloom.
The intricacies of the human drama and the manner in which
it plays upon the structure of kids fantasy stories and Arthurian themes as
delivered by a deftly crafted script and performances by kids that show a lot
of promise in their field breathe new life into something that could have easily
been a painfully throwaway dead season theatrical dump.
It’s far from a perfect movie, mind you; the third act,
although creative in its set piece construction is a bit less clever than the buildup
of the rest of the movie, which can be occasionally bogged down by humor that
has a few noticeable misses, and those same bullies that manage to show lots of
depth also manage to do so via the sheer conveyance of their actors more so
than what’s written for them on the page.
8 Chivalric Pledges out of 10
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