Once and Future KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD

Guy Ritchie takes a mythic English figure and turns his story into a scrappy ye olde Guy Ritchie-style story in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. With good gusto, he makes Arthur the nexus of a scampering rebellion, a gang who will become the knights of the round table plotting to take down an evil king and crown the rightful heir by heisting supplies, staging ambushes, beating back black-helmeted ne’re-do-wells, and sinking ships. They’re like the distant ancestors of the grubby, low-level criminals who populated Ritchie’s early works – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, RocknRolla. This is fun at times, watching bantering, quick witted oafs and bruisers scheme their way into the highest positions in the land, and all for a noble reason. It’s especially charming because such a light touch and unassuming mode sits right next to the lugubrious solemnity of High Fantasy, dark magic swirling up stone walls, slithering snake women promising good luck in return for blood sacrifice, giant bats, enormous serpents, war elephants, magic rocks, and a sword in a stone. (That that last one is guarded by David Beckham cameoing as one of the villain’s henchman tells you something about the contrast set up here.) This isn’t nearly as fun a finished product as Ritchie’s spry, visually playful, charmingly plotted reimaginings – two red-blooded Sherlock Holmes adventures and a super cool Man from U.N.C.L.E. – but it has its charms.

The film errs on the side of gloopy CG confrontations and thin characterization, especially in its drearily predictable grand finale, but is otherwise fantasy filmmaking done up with pleasurable genre resonances. Its murky opening, quietly drifting across foggy green hills while mysterious magic erupts in the distance reminds me of nothing less than John Boorman’s brilliantly bonkers sci-fi Zardoz crossed with his Arthurian take, Excalibur. Fire blasts forth and a ginormous battle involves a king jumping his horse from a parapet onto an elephantine platform. This noble hero king (Eric Bana) is victorious, but abruptly betrayed by a nefarious usurper (Jude Law) who covets the crown (and works on self-taught Dark Arts, hoping to one day graduate to master Firestarter). A tiny orphaned prince is floated down the river – Moses style, in this never-ending parade of legendary allusions – and raised in a blisteringly rapid-fire montage that takes him from naïve boy taken in by kind criminals to a tough, streetwise brawler. Grown (into Charlie Hunnam), he’s as quick with his quips as he is with his fists, all swaggering confidence even when he’s doubting himself, like when that sword comes out of the stone and the kingdom’s revolutionaries (led by Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) scoop him up into their plots against the evil reigning o’er the land.

Generally easy going and light on its feet, despite plodding inevitably to a dull, clangorous climactic confrontation, Ritchie goes all in on his stylish energy. His films, good, bad, and in between (like this one), manage to be at once rough-and-tumble and smooth operators. He fills this telling with snap zooms, propulsive smash cuts, speed ramping, and zippy, fluid, computer-assisted dipping, spinning, and flying establishing shots. He also draws on his Rubik’s-cube-jumbled approach to what in other hands would be conventional setups and payoffs. Instead of long sequences of exposition leading up to bursts of action, he will often intercut the two, cross-cutting speeches and arguments and planning with execution. We see Arthur and his band of would-be heroes devise a trip into a monster-filled wasteland where he must learn to control his magic sword by placing it on a magic rock, their words carrying over as the soundtrack to a lightning fast montage of creature feature derring-do. This gives the picture a jumpy jangle, at once ponderously mythic and casually loping. No one has time to catch their breath between spasms of style, but the movie somehow accrues a sense of heavy sag.

It never quite finds a way to reconcile these competing tendencies, but as a Ritchie romp – co-written, photographed, scored, and edited by some of his familiar collaborators – it never quite loses its loose-limbed charms either. They’re there jolting and jumping underneath even the stateliest fantasy tropes, production design from Game of Thrones vets turned slightly askew, like when the Lady in the Lake appears to pull Arthur through an impossibly deep mud puddle in a dime-store adventure version of a memorably gross Trainspotting swim. So, it’s not totally satisfying. But it’s also not every day you see a movie that straight-faced sends its hero into battle against Rodents of Unusual Size, or includes a moment when a growling Jude Law cuts off a man’s ear and whispers one last threat into it. Those are the sorts of charming eccentricities of which these dusty big-budget boondoggles could use more.

Music of the Heart: SING STREET

Writer-director John Carney is apparently on a mission to make earnest sentimental movies about the power of music bringing people together and helping nice people discover their passions. His latest is Sing Street, a return to his native Ireland after a jaunt to Hollywood for the slick and phony music business-set Begin Again. The perfect middle ground between that and his raw and tender debut film, the great busker romance Once, his new effort is a conventional and conventionally appealing music picture. It’s about a scrappy group of lower-class kids with big dreams, misfits and outcasts who, in making music together, find common cause and cause for hope. It’s set in the late 80s, so the kids find inspiration in the likes of Duran Duran, a-ha, and The Clash, heavy on the driving electric synths and keyboards, splashy snares, spacious soaring vocals, and energetic bass. (It’s not the Beatles, one father grumbles, funny because we’re farther from the 80s than they were the 60s.) The movie makes familiar plot moves, but gets exactly right the sense of youthful discovery, where music isn’t just a key part of identity, but new and alive with possibility.

Our lead is Cosmo, a meek 15-year-old boy (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in an engaging screen debut) whose parents (Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen and Orphan Black’s Maria Doyle Kennedy) announce a budget crunch. This takes him out of a nice Jesuit school and into a cruel one operating on a harsher brand of Catholicism. He’s immediately unhappy, a target for the bullies amongst peers and priests alike. Good thing he gets an immediate crush on a cool dropout girl (Lucy Boynton) and thinks up an icebreaker on the spot: “Want to be in a music video?” She says yes, so he runs back to the one pal he’s managed to befriend (Ben Carolan) and tells him, “We need to start a band.” Under the tutelage of his stoner older brother (Jack Reynor) and his record collection, he starts to think up a sound. With this fresh sense of mission he’s able to meet new friends, including a sheepish musician (Mark McKenna) who becomes his songwriting partner, a keyboardist (Percy Chamburuka), a bassist (Conor Hamilton), and a drummer (Karl Rice). Just like that, they’re a band.

There’s some wistful irony to a period piece in which the a character asserts his New Wave pop punk band will be about the future, not the nostalgia acts of other schools’ cover bands. Some of the film’s appeal sits squarely in nostalgia, looking lovingly on fashion, hair, and sounds of 80’s Ireland. It follows the naïve and earnest group cobbling together an evolving look – pastel suits, hair dye, Halloween costumes, and glam-rock makeup – then lugging equipment around to practice and perform for their own enjoyment. They have a cassette recorder around to play back their outfits’ songs, a heavy camcorder for taping their dancing and mugging for creative super-low-budget music videos. There is terrific creative energy in seeing the music come together, first shyly and fumblingly, then with what can only be described as total teenage confidence. The original songs, by Carney and a variety of collaborators (including Once’s Glen Hansard), are all quite good, some of which could be honest-to-goodness hits on the radio today.

Every number – catchy hummable toe-tappers all – conveniently flows directly out of the lead’s feelings throughout the narrative. This gives movie and music a shared spine that keeps focus narrowly on Cosmo’s concerns. It’s never as much an ensemble delight as its band-centric story approaches from time to time – the other kids are fun to hang around, but they’re not developed much beyond their surface features – but the charming boy-grows-up character piece has its sweetness. There’s an easy, straightforward romanticism on display in an adorably chaste presentation of its puppy love crush, and in the giddy rush creativity brings to its characters’ steps. (It shares with We Are the Best! and That Thing You Do! the cheery spirit of youthful musicianship. No exclamation needed.) Carney shapes the film to state its themes and emotions plainly, with the direct clarity of an easy YA novel.

It gets its effect through such unfussy and direct emotional appeals, feinting in direction of more serious ideas before caving in with syrupy pop resolutions – look at the bully’s fate, for example – albeit with room for sadness and disappointment to linger. One of its best sequences is a rehearsal that expands into Cosmo’s fantasy, an elaborate dance number that becomes a dream of happy endings that’ll never happen. No matter how much the music may lift his spirits and make him friends, some problems – familial, financial, and so on – won’t change. It keeps some perspective. Music’s ability to unite has its limits, but using the artistic impulses which draw these kids together, as a means of defining their identities by trying on new ones, is a bighearted approach to likable cliché. It works because it’s presented so sincerely and simply, aware of its characters and their worlds’ specificity, without pushing the story to miserabilism one the one side or false hope on the other. It stakes out comfortable and endearing feel-good middle ground.

Running on Empty: MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS

The kids stuck in a maze in last year’s young adult franchise starter The Maze Runner are out of the labyrinth and in a post-apocalyptic confusion in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. There’s not a single maze to be found, but there’s still plenty of running as a group of boys and one girl find themselves in a mysterious compound where a commander (Aidan Gillen) tells them to be patient and he’ll take them to a better place. Turns out he’s lying, because of course he is. So off the kids run into a desert wasteland stretched between ruined cities. The world has ended, and they have no idea what to do, so why not keep running from the guys with guns who want to recapture them and feed their blood into blue vats pumping out potential vaccines for a zombie virus. (That doesn’t seem too bad, considering.) It really is that simple, but I don’t know why the whole thing has to be knotted up like no one has a clue, or why it takes our heroes so long to figure out their next move.

The least interesting of this cycle of teen adventure series – behind The Hunger Games, and Twilight, and even the thin derivative Divergent – the Maze Runners are without personality. It’s a dystopian sci-fi zombie conspiracy mystery with a screenplay (again by T.S. Nowlin) that works exactly like a jumble of tropes and half-formed carbon copies of better ideas used more effectively elsewhere. The characters are undifferentiated. There’s the lead (Dylan O’Brien), his buddies (Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden, Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and a girl (Kaya Scodelario), running through the desert called The Scorch, trying to survive. But between this movie and the last, we’ve spent nearly four hours with this group and I still couldn’t begin to tell you what their goals, hopes, dreams, and proclivities are.

They’re just the runway-ready grubby survivors, lost in scorching heat and stuck in a nightmare of zombie imagery. We know they’re the heroes because they’re young and this is YA. The bad guys are of course the grown-ups with the evil organization (the World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department – or Wicked, for real). It’s never entirely clear why the bad are so bad and the good are worth caring about, but never mind. Grown-ups just don’t understand. The escaped teens have nowhere to turn, and no interior lives to draw upon. Now, I could understand their spotty backstories, since their memories were wiped. But where’s the personality? They are thoroughly bland and lifeless despite the young actors’ best efforts to imbue their line readings with meaning, strain, and stress. When they run, they throw their whole bodies into it, swinging their arms side to side and twisting their torsos. It’s like they’re trying to run right off the screen and out of the theater. I knew the feeling.

As I sat through the movie’s opening stretches, I found myself wondering if the whole thing could be improved by the presence of some welcome older character actors who could at least elevate the dull, empty proceedings with their gravitas and charm. Soon enough, it started regularly introducing tiny nothing parts for the likes of Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, Lili Taylor, and Barry Pepper. But even they can’t save scenes that require them to do nothing more than gravely intone exposition or wait for effects work to explode around them. Lifeless dreck, there’s not one moment lively or interesting in and of itself. The closest it gets are a sequence set in an abandoned zombie-infested shopping mall and, later, a woman (Rose Salazar) stuck on a rapidly cracking pane of glass over a deadly vertiginous height. In other words, even at its best it’s weakly lifted from better movies (Dawn of the Dead and The Lost World, respectively) without any creative twist or winking homage.

It’s just borrowed ingenuity heaped on a derivative structure. On a technical level it’s competently made, with convincing effects, sturdy photography, and some brisk action cutting. A moment involving a safe house rigged to self-destruct has a clever beat or two, and a moment of climactic betrayal-induced dread works well enough. But crushing boredom takes up most of its 131 long minutes as I quickly lost interest. I suspect director Wes Ball, helming the sequel to his directorial debut, could do good decent work given a better screenplay. Maybe a corporate superhero universe will call. But here a talented cast and crew have far too little to work with. It’s slick, professional, and completely uninteresting.