Review: 'A Knight's Tale'

Picture a lavish medieval spectacle, a crowd of spectators in the English countryside gathered around men in armoured splendour astride brawny horses, heraldry and vivid period details abounding...

Now imagine watching that same crowd breaking into The Wave and clapping in time to Queen's "We Will Rock You."

That's the shockingly dumb, hilariously incongruous concept that you must swallow in order not to laugh your butt off, in the most dismissive way, at "A Knight's Tale."

This first onslaught of medieval-England-meets-'70s-power-rock comes early, like a warning bell. It's meant to tell us this will be an unserious romp, not a BBC "Masterpiece Theatre" full of oh-so-English drama and perfect diction.

Me, I just laughed my butt off -- dismissively, of course -- and continued to do so through most of this ill-conceived farce.

"A Knight's Tale" is two completely different movie ideas jousting for superiority. One is a teen action-adventure for young, drooling female fans of Heath Ledger ("The Patriot"). The other attempts to remake both "Gladiator" and "Braveheart" without the heftier themes or plot of either to support such hubris.

Needless to say, this hopelessly ambitious yet pandering muddle doesn't work. The sudden bursts of jousting set to Bachman-Turner Overdrive are nothing if not jarring. And in between there are pallid, overwritten love scenes and attempts to dramatize an ill-explained but presumably intense rivalry between William and his jousting foe ? the swarthy, menacing Rufus Sewell as Adhemar.

Aussie actor Ledger plays William, a low-born boy with dreams of rising to nobility. (The story is "loosely based" on Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," which is like saying hip-hop is loosely based on Gregorian chant.)

William gets his chance to masquerade as a jousting knight -- only noblemen need apply for these tests of chivalry -- when his squire suddenly dies before a match.

This sets off a roam across the countryside in search of jousting fame, with his travelling buddies Wat (a bizarre, Harpo-Marx-ish schtick by Alan Tudyk)and Roland (Mark Addy -- the can't-catch-a-good-script chubby guy who was so great in "The Full Monty." Well, he did land the role of Fred in the Flintstones' "Viva Rock Vegas" but that was just lucky).

William also comes under the spell of a fair princess, of course, in Angelina Jolie-lookalike Shannyn Sossamon. The beautiful Jocelyn's outfits are extraordinarily au courant for the Middle Ages, ranging from sheer black revealing numbers to chinois chic, with salon stylings to match.

Her scenes with William are terribly overdressed, too. Writer-director-producer Brian Helgeland -- who, almost incomprehensibly, also co-wrote "L.A. Confidential" -- suddenly causes his characters to wax philosophical, like goofy kids reenacting "Shakespeare In Love."

Helgeland even throws Chaucer himself into the mix, as a slightly mad roving writer (Paul Bettany, at least having some fun in the role) who befriends William and helps to orate his glory to the crowds. It doesn't help matters that William and his medieval sidekicks all refer to this literary master as "Jeff."

The slow-mo action scenes are elaborately shot and mildly interesting, but after a few jousts, you realize pretty fully that it's just a game where guys hit each other ridiculously hard in the chest with a stick. If there's no real dramatic tension to anchor these displays of machismo, what's the point of all this?

I suppose if you can get a kick from watching a parade of knights gamboling into London to the sound of "The Boys Are Back In Town," this could work for you. But by that point, I wasn't laughing any more. All that remained was a pained wince. -- Joseph Ruttle