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What the trailer and intro for this movie suggest is that the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table is in fact based on a real person and actual events. Thus the movie claims to be based on a true story. However it happened, whatever actually did go down isn’t important. For the sake of the film and its claim, we, the audience, need to be convinced that it at least could’ve happened the way the film says. Personally, I was entertained and satisfied with the interpretation of the legend. It was a convincingly original take on what history has seemed to forget.
In the film Clive Owen plays Arthur, whose heritage belongs in both Rome and Britain, but whose loyalties lie in the hands of Rome. He and his knights have fought for the Roman Empire for fifteen years and are finished with it. They now seek their freedom and free passage into Rome. That wish is granted under the condition that they fetch a family being hunted by the dreaded Saxons, and who is very dear the Pope. Because of his devotion to God, Arthur agrees to do so under the strict terms that he and his men no longer belong to Rome, but to themselves.
When they arrive at their destination, they find that the head of the town (and family) is tyrannical to his serfs and thinks that it is God's command that the peasants do what he tells them. If they refuse he sends them to the monks, who sacrifice them for being “sinners”. Arthur liberates the persecuted people in the town and takes the family where they need to be. Meanwhile the Saxons are closing in on Arthur’s knights and he’s tiring. The final third of the film is that conflict unfolding.
So what is the flaw in this film? Well, it is way too long. The battles are unnecessarily elongated and become as tiresome as Arthur does. What saves that error from taking the film all the way under are the excellent performances. Owen is the sort of actor who likes to take over the person he’s playing. Anything less, I suppose, would be faulty performance on his part because Owen is a very involving actor. This film, on the other hand, is not.
When directors are given large-sized films like this, it’s their responsibility to make us part of it. If he succeeds in doing so, then the audience becomes proportionate to that largeness, and then the characters aren’t so translucent. We want to level with them, and so they must be impossible to see through.
But what Fuqua understands is that this film is supposed to be telling a part of history; something that Jerry Zucker obviously forgot about in “First Knight” (1995). Zucker’s film gathers lots of blue-induced sets and people to battle against a bunch of guys dressed in black. It’s the humanness and grittiness that Fuqua has captured, not the part about being abnormally human and fake. And according to this film, Arthur and his knights are in fact real human beings (who can chug arrows far longer than the enemy can). ***