A Knight's Tale

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This, to me, has always been one of the strangest recommendations given to me. This "reader suggestion" doesn't actually come from one reader in particular, but several - and its recommendation also dates all the way back to its initial release in 2001, first coming from several peers at school. I, however, would consistently avoid watching for the plain and simple reason that I felt I couldn't truly appreciate something that juggled medieval times with a modern soundtrack. The key song, of course, being Queen's 'We Will Rock You', which is a solid enough tune to be able to appeal to a mass audience. More on that later.

Taking place in 14th century Europe, a great jouster named Sir Ector (Nick Brimble) has died, leaving behind his squires, William (Heath Ledger), Roland (Mark Addy) and Wat (Alan Tudyk). Being in the midst of a tournament, Ector was close to winning. Now destitute, however, William gets the bright idea to dress up as Ector, impersonate him, and win the tournament and all that comes with it. He naturally wins, and with the win comes the want to make a life of it, collecting riches along the way. Only nobles are allowed to compete, however that's resolved with real-life 14th century writer/poet Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany) comes into the picture, as he writes them a patent of nobility and gives William the name of Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein" from Gelderland; also real with details of his early life spotty at best.

​This eventually becomes a love story when William meets the likes of Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon); a noblewoman who he falls head-over-heels for. He continues to fight and joust in an attempt to win her heart, but is rivaled both in battle and love by Count Adhemar of Anjou (Rufus Sewell). So basically what we have here is a work of historical fan fiction, as it uses real people and real concepts, but the artist gives it their own spin. A good comparison of this would be something like Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds'. And truth be told, the actual story is pretty good, and it does it with a certain sense of humor that does suggest not to take things too seriously.

The thing is, however, I've always had a bit of a personal issue when it comes to matching era with music. I'll probably always feel that the music should fit the time period in some way, and to modernize it takes care. I would argue two examples of movies that did it right were 'The Great Gatsby', with it's modern hip hop take on swing music; and 'Guardians of the Galaxy' using retro pop music in an otherwise very futuristic setting with a story behind the music. But while this actually does have a solid soundtrack, nothing about it makes sense to me, and it just feels completely out of place. If you were to play this soundtrack for anyone who had absolutely no knowledge of this movie, I frankly doubt they'd be able to land on anything with a medieval theme. So it's an odd combo of decent movie, decent soundtrack, disappointing results.

Once again though, I do feel like this is a movie not to be taken seriously, and the whole soundtrack thing really is just a personal nitpick. All in all, I was still pretty entertained by it, and it was actually somewhat a breath of fresh air to see something taking place in that time period that didn't feel like it needed to be "epic". When you get right down to it, there's a hell of a lot of time period movies that are serious, dark, and want to keep an audience on the edge of their seats - which is awesome, and I love it. But this viewing did provide me with further proof that thngs don't necessarily have to follow a formula to be entertaining. Though I still think this was passable at best, and couldn't hold a candle to some of the bigger productions out there, similar, I can't deny that I had fun.

3/5

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