Excalibur (1981) – Review

I’ve never met John Boorman in the flesh, but I’m willing to bet cash money that restraint wasn’t high on his list of priorities whenever he delved headlong into another movie project. Whether subjecting us to the infamous “squeal like a pig” sequence in the near-peerless Deliverance, the casual brutality of Point Blank, or whatever the Hell was going on in Zardoz, the director had a nack for plunging his audience directly into whatever world he was creating.
However, few worlds were as batshit crazy as the one created for Excalibur, an eccentric stab at the Arthurian legend that’s as mad as a sack of LSD sodden howler monkeys and contains more unrestrained, huge, shouty performances than a Brian Blessed marathon.
But is a defiant vision and lashings of overacting enough to create legends to move kingdoms? I’ve no idea, but I know this: Talk is for lovers. Bring me the sword to be king!

Essentially detailing the life and times of Arthur Pendragon, this epic tale begins before the famous king’s birth as his father, Uther Pendragon, is bequeathed the titular sword of power by the wizard Merlin in order to take his place as ruler and smite his enemies. However, absolute rule isn’t enough for this overreaching monarch and after his loins are well and truly stirred by the sight of a rival kings wife, he gets the sorcerer to perform some shape shifting glamour to have his way with her.
Not only does this ultimately lead to Uther’s death, but it leads to a son, Arthur, whom Merlin takes under his wing and the sword, Excalibur, being lodged in a stone until the rightful king can come along and remove it.
Years pass, and by some quirk of fate, young Arthur (although he looks no younger than 37) stumbles across the blade while doing tome as a bumbling squire and removes the thing to the shock of all who witness. While the crowning of some anonymous, gangly child understandably causes a rift between the kingdoms, Arthur’s natural decency soon wins over all and before you know it, he has a fair and just rule in place with that legendary round table installed that really ties the room together.
However, even with Merlin and a clutch of decent Knights by his side, Arthur sees his rule buffeted by both friend and foe. Not only does his half-sister, Morgana, have her eye on the throne as she convinces Merlin to teach her the arts of sorcery, but Arthur’s dearest friend, the absurdly virtuous Lancelot, has unwittingly found himself stuck in a tempestuous love triangle with the king’s beloved wife, Guinevere. As this spot of Jerry Springer-style scandal of the Dark Ages gives Morgana the edge she needs to strike, everything Arthur has built seems destined to fall, but if a quest for the Holy Grail bears fruit, all might still be saved.

So, a few things before we get into the meat of it all. 1) watching this movie in the wake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and being even remotely able to take it seriously is nigh on impossible, and 2) I’m not even sure if I even liked the film in a conventional sense, but there’s something about the utterly uncynical way that Boorman tackles his subject that kept me bolted in place. Seemingly unconcerned with trivial matters such as conventional performances, pace or even character depth, the director stages the movie almost like an opera, telling the tale as extravagantly as he can, swapping out tenors and sopranos for the muscular diaphragms of a bunch of classically trained actors who bellow their lines with the subtlety of a sonic boom. Never once pausing to wink at the camera or break character in any way, the only movie I can think of that provided a similar experience was John Milius’ delightfully bonkers stab at Conan The Barbarian, which also treated its fantasy trapping with the deadly seriousness of Hamlet no matter how absurd they may be. It’s this complete lack of cynicism that makes Excalibur so bewitching and while other, cheapjack, Roger Corman-esque productions treated the world of knights and wizards with ropey optical effects and rubbery monsters, Boorman goes for a stylized “reality” that portrays magic purely through music, performance and a judicious use of a smoke machine that implies magic, but doesn’t cheapen it with zappy gobbledygook.
However, who the hell needs visual effects when the over developed larynx of every actor here is a special effect of their very own, and I truly believe that there may not be another movie that exists that contains as much intense overacting as Excalibur. The sheer amount of melodrama on hand here may often feel like a vast mid-life crisis has fallen over a bunch of medieval reenacters, but its tremendously entertaining to see a cast of professional shouters play their trade with absolutely no restrictions whatsoever. Actors like Nigel Terry, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Ciarán Hinds and Nicholas Clay treat every line reading as serious as a heart attack, alternating between delivering their quieter lines with such intensity, their entire bodies quake, to suddenly leaping to their feet and and becoming the most vociferous carbon based lifeform on the face of the earth at the drop of a hat.

However, best of these is Nicol Williamson’s Merlin, a personality-switching mage in a silver skull cap who switches from bemused befuddlement to thundering commands often in the same sentence and you have to feel that no only did Boorman draw from Tolkien to bring this version of the famous, machiavellian magic flinger to life, but it probably had a sizable on Ian Mckellen’s take on Gandalf too.
Yes, a fair amount of the women involved are either here to stir up lust or feelings of jealously in the menfolk (Cherie Lunghi’s Guinevere might as well be a mannequin for all the range she’s required to show), but thankfully, Helen Mirren’s seductively evil Morgana is on hand to melt celluloid with a glance and tip some of the balance even though the Cruz of her master plan is to boff her half-brother to create an heir.
Genuinely unlike 99% of all other fantasy movies made, Excalibur’s strengths are amusingly also its weaknesses. Yes, the tone is impressive, but Boorman is so determined to preserve the legend, you don’t get a feel for any of the characters as actual people and as everyone spends the majority of the film in clanking armour and whispy facial hair, it’s often tough to tell your Gawains from your Percivals, especially during the bewildering, bloody battle scenes. There’s also the slight issue of its rampant seriousness being instantly undone the second your mind brings up images of the clopping coconut shells and French insults of Monty Python’s version which renders a lot of the exaggerated bluster unintentionally chucklesome.

But still, this is unfettered filmmaking at it’s most pure, unafraid of any potential silliness such an earnest, straight-laced production will undoubtedly court and a salute to all involved is well deserved, even if the finished product is blatantly out of its mind.
“On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.” utters Graham Chapman’s Arthur in the Python version; well, yeah – but thanks to Boorman, it’s also fucking awesome too.

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