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.

Shivering Heights: CRIMSON PEAK

“Ghosts are real,” Edith Cushing says. She tells us twice, bookending Crimson Peak with her declaration. The film’s writer/director Guillermo del Toro certainly believes this, too. He’s not playing around. He uses ghosts not for cheap shocks, but for deeply intertwined thematic importance and emotional resonance. He respects their mythological importance, as well as their psychological underpinnings. It’s what gives his dark fantasies such heft, mingling magical realism with more elaborate flights of fancy. He knows ghosts are not merely frightening. They’re expressions of deep sorrow, of lingering pain, of trauma’s echoes haunting those left behind. His latest film is indeed a ghost story, but one that uses the spirits as an added flavoring in a richly wondrous, baroquely designed story of high emotion and uncanny delights.

The ghosts are a metaphor. That’s another repeated line, as Ms. Cushing (her last name a tribute to Peter Cushing, no doubt) is an aspiring novelist in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. She's hard at work on a manuscript for a haunting story. Played by Mia Wasikowska as a smart, shy young woman bristling against patriarchal constraints, she’s determined to follow in her hero Mary Shelley’s footsteps and publish her macabre tale. An editor tells her to add a little romance. She reluctantly decides to do so, but only a few chapters’ worth. This is one of Del Toro’s meta winks, a flickering of levity in a serious, sumptuously appointed production imbued with his love for gothic romance in every frame. Cushing’s father (Jim Beaver) is a rich man who welcomes a mysterious Englishman (Tom Hiddleston) with an investment opportunity. The stranger doesn’t receive Mr. Cushing’s money, but walks away with the daughter’s heart, much to the chagrin of the charming young ophthalmologist (Charlie Hunnam) she ignores.

What comes next is a feast of period detail, as we waltz through a ballroom, glide into boardrooms, stroll along leafy autumnal parks, and end up nestled in drawing rooms where softly murmured sweet nothings are implied. Soon enough, Ms. Cushing is swept away to her new beau’s remote family mansion deep in the English countryside, where he and his severe sister (Jessica Chastain) intend to mine copious runny red clay out of the soil, turning a profit in the process. Chastain, in a series of dramatic flowing gowns, is bewitching, a completely controlled performance of a woman so elegantly tightly wound, it’s not if she’ll snap, but when. Hiddleston is suave and sinister, with something hollow about his affections. Wasikowska, showing eager curiosity mixed with grief and infatuation, plays a romantic slowly frightened by what she finds. It’s all so alluring, and so dreadful, even in the same instant.

The house is vast and creepy, crumbling with loose brick, sinking into the soft ground, the clay seeping around floorboards and bubbling out of pipes. It’s a lovingly photographed spooky place, one of the great movie spaces in recent memory. There are dark corridors, locked rooms, drafty windows, fluttering insects, dusty corners, voluminous curtains, dripping cavernous basements, looming portraits, a rickety elevator retrofitted along a spiraling staircase, and a hole in the entryway’s ceiling letting dead leaves or snow flurries flutter down. But it’s not just a visual feast of a haunted mansion. It’s a dark, creaking home full of cold mystery, richly decorated with rotting glamour, and possessed with the spectral memories of long buried secrets. Translucent skeletal ghosts howling while evaporating smoky red tendrils are an alarm alerting Ms. Cushing that all is not well in this house.

Del Toro, with co-writer Matthew Robbins, unravels mysteries with a pulpy brio, telling his tale with a studied patience for lurid detail and swooning with strong emotions: love, terror, and the riveting power of the sublimely, beautifully perverse. It transcends pastiche (or camp throwback) because he’s not interested in making a tribute to stories and styles he loves. He wants to make a story that’ll sit comfortably alongside the classics. This confidence of design and intention lends the film’s movement, structure, and appeal a sense of history. Its machinations resonate like an old tale, like settling in to read a great forgotten book you’ve discovered tucked away in the corner of a cozy library, rich in complex archaic language and lush generous plotting that slowly sinks in like a comfortable chair beside a roaring fireplace.

Del Toro draws on inspirations both literary – Austen and the Brontes, Ann Radcliffe and Daphne du Maurier – and cinematic – Hitchcock and Lewton, Corman’s Poe cycle, Hammer horror. The result is uniquely his own, preoccupied with hidden histories and deadly secrets, soulful monsters, and innocents most prepared to tremblingly, yet bravely, confront the evils around them. When Wasikowska, dressed in a lacy, frilly nightgown a slightly warmer white than her pale skin, heads down a dark clammy hallway armed only with a lit candelabra, it’s a classic image of this sort of story. It’s easy to see her as a source of hope amidst so much eerie unquiet. (There are also echoes of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and other Del Toro films past.) Dan Lausten’s cinematography is soaked in colors: blood reds, bruising blacks and blues, velvety purples. The film is sensual and sensitive, a completely transporting waking dream.

As the dark truths about the situation bleed through the lush gothic romance, the film culminates with gore and shock, true to its melancholy heart. Through the paranormal activity, and the lavish historical setting, Del Toro swoops with his haunted characters, finding in swirling cloth and swift stabs personal tragedies exhumed, sins divulged, and betrayals revealed. It is hugely entertaining and entrancing, and in the swirling emotional climaxes, it finds great artful truth, wedded to brilliantly, intoxicatingly stylish horror-tinged melodrama. It says the past is rarely finished with us, so we may as well give over to what it wants, the better to help us fight our way to recovery. Ghosts come in a variety of forms. Some float down halls. Others live within us, reminding us of pain we need to heal, trauma we must endure. The suspense: how we emerge intact with a great story to tell.

Monster Smash: PACIFIC RIM

Hollywood may be in the business of talking Earth’s destruction to death, but at least once in a while we get a lumbering blockbuster done with a light touch and clear affection for the genres it inhabits. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim grabs gleefully two classic standbys of Japanese science fiction, the giant monster attack and the man in huge robot suit, and hurtles them together at top speed. The result is an exuberant creature feature that’s thought through the implications of its premise in satisfyingly complete ways that serve as a nice backdrop for larger than life one-on-one boxing matches between hulking mechanical defenders and slimy, resourceful beasties.

Del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, among other great fantasies, has always been interested in creating cinematic worlds to wander around in, feats of imagination that feel fully realized. He’s done it again, this time in a film that’s as fast and forward moving as anything he’s ever done. It’s a crackling thin B-movie blown up on an A-budget, alive with the power to be as big as the filmmaker’s imaginations. It’s exactly the movie it wants to be, simply and sincerely and nothing more.

It starts with a rift in the Pacific Rim that allows monsters from another dimension to slip through one at a time. Called Kaiju, these massive creatures, a sort of combination of dinosaur and shark, wage devastating attacks on coastal cities. All seems lost until humanity bands together to create gigantic robots to fight back. As tall as skyscrapers and sturdy as tanks, these enormous fighting machines are too powerful for just one pilot. To move, to fight, and to win, it takes two people moving in perfect synchronization. They call it a “neural bridge” through which they “cerebral drift,” just some of many priceless bits of technobabble here.

The robots are successful. The problem seems to be contained. And here’s the first sign that we’re not in the hands of a filmmaker who will be content to serve up the concept and stop there: that all happens before the title card. We skip ahead several years and the monsters are still arriving, but now with greater and greater frequency. Mankind needs a last ditch effort to shut these Kaiju down once and for all or the apocalypse will surely come thundering down. The film follows a band of international military and scientific personal (refreshingly global-minded) as they scramble to save mankind from certain doom.

The characters are vibrant B-movie types: tough guys, nerdy researchers, control room button-pushers, ambitious young professionals, nervous civilians, and flamboyant criminals. And yet del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham haven’t been content to stop there. They’ve created flesh-and-blood archetypes that don’t just pose and snap jargon at each other. They have interior lives that are quickly drawn in big gestures and through action, but are no less impactful because of it. The film is in some ways narratively skimpy, but in all ways imagination rich, with characters there to provide just enough emotion to power the enthusiastic exploration of the simple, infectiously entertaining premise.

The cast is important to pulling this off. The leader of the team is Idris Elba, all gravitas and stillness, exerting complete unquestioned authority over the mission. He recruits a talented pilot (Charlie Hunnam) who retired years earlier after, as we see in the pre-title sequence, suffering a devastating loss of his co-pilot in a Kaiju attack. Elba needs the pilot’s expertise to attempt the endgame, pairing him with a hugely talented, but untested, pilot (Rinko Kikuchi), who has traumatic attack-related memories of her own. The relationships between these three form the solid core from which we can care somewhat about the people in the mechanical contraptions punching monsters in the jaw.

But that’s not to say the rest of the characters contribute nothing to the larger picture. A father-and-son team of pilots (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky) provides additional emotional investment and there are fun turns for, among others, Charlie Day as a monster-obsessed scientist and Ron Perlman as a flashy king of Hong Kong’s black market for Kaiju organs. Once the monsters appeared, many people found new jobs to do and more money to make. These roles are examples of how del Toro so purposefully thinks through the way the world has changed in the years since the monsters first appeared.

It’s the little things, like the neighborhood built into a huge Kaiju skeleton in Hong Kong, that remind you how fully and convincingly drawn this future society is, scuffed, worn and torn as if people actually live and die in it. But that’s just the del Toro way, to create fully imagined worlds by lovingly synthesizing a variety of influences through his recognizably soulful and loving genre vision. Pacific Rim is the stuff of anime and Godzilla, Transformers and Harryhausen. (There’s also a computer voiced by Portal’s Ellen McLain, a nice sonic touch.) I suppose such smoothly incorporated variety is only natural for film that’s a product of a Mexican directing a Hollywood riff on Japanese sci-fi.

Here the pieces work together in perfect harmony. It’s a film of absorbing special effects and terrific design. It’s so lived in and the characters have such ease within it that the film practically plays like a promising original effort and its bigger better sequel at the same time. Guillermo Navarro’s cinematography is a palate of inky primary colors from which emerge the gorgeous cold blues and warm reds of robotics and readouts, and scaly green and brown creatures from the deep. The sound design is rich with clicks, whirs, growls, and punches. Each step of the beasts both unnatural and manmade makes the theater quake with thunderous bass. The fights are occasionally confusing, but always spectacularly framed for maximum impact of scale, our attackers and defenders towering over us. It’s altogether a spellbinding sensation.

We see all kinds of digital destruction every weekend lately, but here’s a kind that’s grounded and thought through. It brings back some of the simple power of wonder, to stare up at unreal sights that dwarf us and makes us feel something of the nourishing power of the fantastic once again. The film is one of massive scale handled with a light touch, overpowering without overwhelming. It’s not a great movie, but it’s great creature feature fun, a rare ebullient expression of serious spectacle.

In the Bleak Mid-November: DEADFALL

Deadfall is the kind of unassuming thriller that’s built entirely out of familiar parts and yet still manages to make the parts work well together from time to time. It’s a dark, wintry little movie that starts on the eve of Thanksgiving, with brother and sister criminals (Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde) counting the money from their heist while zooming up a snowy, rural Michigan road. Trouble starts when they hit a deer and flip their car into a ditch, an accident that draws the attention of a passing state trooper. Covering their tracks, the brother and sister shoot him dead and split up, running their separate ways through the forest as a manhunt quickly assembles from the nearby police station.

A sort of rural noir with splashes of local color, this small, tight movie grabs suspense out of endless white plains and forests of hunters, cabins, and snowmobiles, as well as the kindness of strangers. Even though it’s actually Montreal substituting for Michigan, the setting feels convincing and atypical enough to draw some attention. Now, I’m not saying Deadfall is as good as Fargo, but much like the Coen brothers did with that film, this crime picture gains some fun and novelty out of setting traditional crime movie elements against the backdrop of an unexpected setting. Unlike the Coens, who appear to be constitutionally incapable of playing anything straight for too long – indeed it’s their verbal and visual wit that make them near constant delights – this film is dark and relentless.

The plot grows to include a couple of broken families trying to reconnect over this Thanksgiving weekend. In a big house in the country, mere miles from the opening accident, there’s a crusty old retired sheriff (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife (Sissy Spacek) who get a call from their son (Charlie Hunnam) downstate. He’s just been released from jail and wants to stop by. We also meet a tenacious young deputy (Kate Mara) who clashes with the protective, condescending sheriff (Treat Williams), who just happens to be her father. As these family dramas play out against the backdrop of potential danger, the film primes some setup for later satisfying, if a touch predictable and routine, payoff. Especially by the time a snowstorm closes the road and the prodigal son picks up the hitchhiking fugitive woman who’s desperate for a place to meet up with her brother and continue their getaway, it’s clear the shape the story will take. Still, it has some fun getting there.

I certainly don’t mean to oversell this movie. It sags in the middle, drops a few plot points, and cuts off interesting undercurrents before they have much time to develop. We never do figure out the exact nature of the brother and sister’s relationship or receive clarification on various convenient coincidences here and there. It’s also a little silly at times, like when Bana gets into a fight with a stereotypical Native American man who gravely informs his attacker that he was warned about this in a dream, or when two people (I won’t say who) are meant to be in love after a brief, relatively unconvincing, period of time. Come to think of it, just about everything involving Bana’s solo hike to the climax seems awkwardly motivated and weirdly irrelevant to the big picture.

But, working from a script by Zach Dean, director Stefan Ruzowitzky, an Oscar-winner for his Holocaust thriller The Counterfeiters, keeps the tension at a nice even keel. Through unfussy craftsmanship and a trustable, solid cast, he moves things along in a way not entirely dissimilar to the feeling of compulsively turning the pages of some just-satisfying-enough airport novel. I wasn’t involved so much as I was curious to see how the plot would resolve and through what twists the stock characters would have to live to get to the end. This is a movie that works well on that level and on that level alone I was satisfied.