La spada magica - Alla ricerca di Camelot

The wonderful, classic legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table has never been properly handled as a feature film. Even "Excalibur" seemed forced, and perhaps the only truly enjoyable features have been gentle comedies like Disney's "The Sword in the Stone" and of course "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which throw the technical mythology out the window and try to make what's left fun. Eric Idle starred in that latter entry, and he stars here, as one-half of a fairly well-animated, somewhat badly-designed, talking dragon. With Don Rickles' help he becomes a comic sidekick, but the script doesn't let either of them be all that funny, and the animation mixes the beautiful and awful with a disturbing shot-to-shot tickertape rhythm. About 1/4th of the animators here don't seem to know how to animate convincingly, and those who do have to struggle not to let the movie fall down around them. But the animation is still the best part of this woefully misconceived hybrid of randomly-scattered Camelot legend and F-grade science fiction. The science-fiction takes over, sadly. Consider the red-armored, action figure of a villain (played by Gary Oldman, in yet another bad career move). I can't decide if he's Riffraff from Rocky Horror, or Ade Edmonson from the Young Ones. It matters little. Caring not for the great legend sitting right under their feet, the umpteen writers turn out sub-Disney drivel about robots, walking trees, a laughable CGI version of the rock monster from the "Never-Ending Story," and a talking chicken with a hatchet for a beak. Lovely. I'm sure Sir Thomas Malory wanted to put these elements in his "Morte D'Arthur," he simply wasn't clever enough to think of them, right? Who needs Lancelot and Galahad when you've got Lionel and Bladebeak? And does anyone really want Celine Dion Eurovision Song Contest-esque material sprinkled in every few minutes? Supposedly sung by the "characters" of what story there is, but they rarely move their lips to it, so the work is not particularly convincing. An all-star cast is wasted (Sir John Gielgud, for chrissake!), as is the time of anyone watching this confused "Black Cauldron"-esque collage of scenes from other movies. The design looks like Don Bluth traced by Wang, and the entire enterprise made me slightly ill. What a waste of talent. I want to hurt this movie.