This is the kind of movie you'll never see studios roll the dice on ever again......an ambitious sweeping epic that's essentially a fever dream sprung out of its director's over active imagination....
No corporate franchise-building here......director John Boorman, a pure visualist whom everybody thought already flew off the rails with his crazy sci-fi-er "Zardoz" and the much ridiculed "Exorcist II", couldn't have made "Excalibur" a more personal film.....having shot it around the Irish countryside near his house....and populating it with all his children in small supporting roles...
Nor does the film sink under the weight of a hefty budget.....it obviously didn't have one. Boorman, in the great tradition of Roger Corman and every other shlockmeister, uses artful lighting, camera angles and assorted physical trickery to convince you that you're watching a cast of thousands swing swords at each other across vast, far flung, dreamy landscapes.....in reality, the cast mostly traipses around the woods in Boorman's back yard.....
Boorman originally planned to make "Lord Of The Rings" into one heaping, giant movie....when that deal fell apart, he turned to filming the entire Athurian legend, King Arthur from magically induced conception to his skewering by bastard son Mordred.....
But at two hours and twenty minutes, the movie alternately wanders and then hops and skips through all the the Arthur myths......it has arresting visual style throughout, but no forward momentum or urgency of storytelling. Lengthy as it is, it unravels as if entire huge chunks of it were edited out.......what's left plays like an R-rated Renaissance fair....or a Middle Ages museum tour given by a guide who sounds either high on speed or mildly distracted.
The bad stuff first: the young actors playing the key figures Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere........bland, generic and hardly heard from ever again. Boorman also badly dropped the ball with the film's music......this film cried out for a big wall-to-wall muscular, romantic score. Never happens.....Boorman randomly drops in poorly mixed dollops of Wagner and 'Carmina Burana' ...(this is where the low budget really did hurt the film....)
The good stuff: Nicol Williamson's singularly odd Merlin, juicing up every scene he's in. Instead of a heavily white-bearded old sage, Williamson's a devilishly nimble-tongued demi-God....he's closer in spirit and comedic chops to Ray Walston's Mr Applegate in "Damn Yankees"...and doesn't get much farther than Ray did in meddling in mortal affairs. Nicol meets his match in both magic and scene-stealing, in Helen Mirren, playing Arthur's sorceress half-sisiter Morgana. (Supposedly Williamson and Mirren despised each other.....whether that 's true or not, the movie comes alive when they clash..)
And you have to love the "hey! isn't that...." all through the movie.....Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne....
Battle scenes? Plentiful....and we liked that it made knightly combat in full armor what we always imagined.it to be......clumsy, awkward and comically impractical. The knights stagger around, having a hard time even seeing each other as they go Medieval on their asses, and their shiny armor offers little or no protection to either sharp or blunt instruments, so you wonder why the hell they're wearing it at all. (We guess cause they look damn good...)
Sure, "Excalibur"s a mixed up goulash of a movie, but we found fascinating and in its sheer creative bravado, never boring. And these days, you won't find too many movie directors throwing caution to the wind and brazenly attempting such an over-the-top epic coming from the top of their heads.....they're all too busy taping two-character films with their cellphones, hoping for a berth at Sundance. So we'll pull three swords out of the stone....(***)......and rescue you from the "King Arthur" lurking about on the multiplex battlefields, put there by the Mordreds who run Warner Brothers......
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