Tom Taylor – Memphis Flyer

Late in the summer of 2017, a 7-year-old girl named Matilda Jones was swimming in Dozmary Pool in Cornwall, England, when she saw a glint of metal on the bottom. With the help of her father, she pulled a four-foot sword out of the lake. Coincidentally, Dozmary Pool was where King Arthur returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake.

In times past, young Matilda might have either been hailed as the new Queen of England, or promptly assassinated by minions of the actual royal family who did not care to have their divine right to rule questioned by watery tarts lobbing scimitars at peasant girls. As it was, Matilda only got her picture in the Daily Mail, accompanied by a quote from her dad.

Louis Ashbourne Serkis (above) wields Excalibur in Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King.

The new British/American production The Kid Who Would Be King takes the premise of Not Quite Queen Matilda to its logical conclusion. What if a kid in modern Britain found Excalibur? We’re talking the real sword King Arthur wielded, not the one from Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 retelling of Le Morte d’Arthur.

Director Joe Cornish is certainly familiar with Boorman’s fever dream version of England’s foundational mythology. At one point, he gleefully lifts a gag from Excalibur to show the sword’s mystical powers — simply shining a green light on the sword’s shiny steel surface, then cutting to the awestruck face of his hero Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), who is also painted with a green spotlight. Presto! A glowing sword, without any expensive post-production work.

Aside from that cheeky reference, Cornish’s purpose in making The Kid Who Would Be King is far removed from Boorman’s animating spirit of “Let’s all take peyote and play Knights of the Round Table!” Instead, he has taken the long knives to Arthurian legend and carved out a myth suitable for 21st-century sensibilities. Alex and his best mate Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) reside at the bottom of the social hierarchy at his stereotypically stifling English private school. The pair’s primary bullies are Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Doris). One day, Alex is chased into a construction site, where he falls and is left for dead by his pursuers. When Alex wakes up, he sees a sword stuck in a half-demolished pillar and, being a 12-year-old boy, he naturally takes it home with him.

The one thing Cornish and Boorman’s movies have in common is Patrick Stewart. Boorman cast the not-yet-bald actor as Queen Guenevere’s father, while Cornish puts him the role of Old Merlin, who shows up when the exposition needs a little gravitas. Young Merlin (who is actually old Merlin, because the fey wizard ages backwards) is played by Angus Imrie, channeling Nicol Williamson’s psychotically eccentric performance from Excalibur. Merlin tells Alex and his “knight” Beddars that they have four days to stop the evil enchantress Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) from using the occasion of a solar eclipse to return to Earth and do lots of bad stuff.

The Hero’s Journey has proven to be a popular and malleable template for films since George Lucas applied its refined form to Star Wars. But the Hero’s Journey in general and Arthurian legend in particular can be problematic in its emphasis in holy bloodlines and “chosen one” mythology. Cornish, who deconstructed alien invasion tropes while launching John Boyega’s career in his debut film Attack the Block, sets out to do the same thing to King Arthur that Rian Johnson did for Star Wars in The Last Jedi: identify and magnify the good parts of the Hero’s Journey while leaving the regressive elements behind. Cornish doesn’t have Johnson’s budget or sweeping vision, but he manages to make the story palatable for post-Potter tastes. Serkis’ performance as a nerdy kid called to kinghood reaches its apex when he recruits Lance and Kaye to his cause, pointing out that Arthur conquered not by force, but by converting his enemies into friends.

Cornish has devoted his subtext to speaking to the fears and animosities of Brexit Britain. The text is inoffensive, all-ages fun that defaults to the lightweight and pulls punches, lest it scare the kiddies too badly. (Say what you will about Harry Potter‘s shortcomings, at least characters died and the stakes felt real.) But did the world really need another blowhard Arthur and a Round Table of gritty, humorless fanatics? The Kid Who Would Be King‘s good-natured positivity seems much more appropriate to the moment.

Stephen King can’t catch a break.

I’m speaking filmically, of course. In all other aspects of his life, King is doing fine. He is probably the most successful writer of the last 50 years. He’s the Charles Dickens of horror, to be read widely and remembered far longer than his contemporaries, even the ones who might have had superior talent. King is a good writer, but he has had fantastic agents.

King’s work has been adapted for film (checks Wikipedia) 67 times! That’s a lot! (The Mangler had two sequels? Who knew?) But with the very notable exceptions of The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me, movies based on King’s works have been pretty awful. (I admit, I have a soft spot for The Running Man, but that was technically a Richard Bachman book.)

The Dark Tower was King’s attempt at epic meta-fantasy and the project that he chipped away at between blockbuster airport paperbacks for 40 years. Clearly inspired by Tolkein, it’s not so much singing dwarves and lembas as it is a deep dive into King’s subconscious. The Dark Tower sits at the center of at expansive multiverse, protecting the multitude of realities where anything goes. Instead of knights in shining armor, the Tower — and thus, all of the multitudes of realities in the multiverse — is defended by a sacred order of Gunslingers, refugees from Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that King was obsessed with when he started the series in the early 1970s. Bits and pieces of King’s passing obsessions and his other books float up through the more than 4,000-page narrative. At one point, King himself makes an appearance as both author and character. In the age when HBO is dropping a cool 10 mil on every hour of Game of Thrones, The Dark Tower‘s seven volumes sound like the perfect fodder for a long-running prestige TV series. Instead, we get this chop job.

Matthew McConaughey (left) fled across the desert, and Idris Elba followed.

Idris Elba was born to play Roland, the supernatural protagonist, last of the Gunslingers. He’s got the natural gravitas and credibility as an ass kicker. Roland’s gun was forged from the sword Excalibur, and he “kills with his heart,” as the Gunslinger’s credo requires. Roland’s sworn enemy is the Man in Black, played by Matthew McConaughey, so pencil thin he seems to have been existing purely on Soylent paste and self-satisfaction.

Armed with the power of suggestion, an army of demonic lackeys, a snazzy Zara for Men duster, and a variety of colored orbs, the Man in Black seeks to destroy the Dark Tower and let in the demons from the dark outer-world so he can … do something. There was a prophecy that said the mind of a child could destroy the Dark Tower, so the Man in Black’s minions prowl the multiverse finding younglings strong in the Shining to feed into his kid-powered super-laser. I was not really clear on what he was hoping to accomplish with the destruction of the multiverse, but maybe if McConaughey put more than a car commercial’s level of effort into the role, I wouldn’t mind.

The young Brooklynite Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is the latest in a line of generic “chosen ones,” complete with evil step family and doomed mother. While in our reality, (“Keystone Earth”), he is repeatedly upstaged by his neighbor Timmy, played by Michael Barbieri of Ira Sach’s Little Men. Director Nikolaj Arcel would have been better off casting Barbieri as his audience surrogate, given how completely charisma-free Taylor is.

The literary Dark Tower is the result of a prodigious mind high on the writings of Joseph Campbell and, in the ’70s and ’80s at least, heroic doses of drugs. But instead of floating freely in Jungian archetypal space, the film just touches all the bases of another generic post-Matrix action fantasy. In the grand scheme of this summers’ colossal wastes of money, it goes down easier than, say, the Pirates of the Caribbean death rattle. But I liked The Dark Tower much better when it was called Big Trouble in Little China. At least Kurt Russell knew how to commit to the ridiculous.