A KNIGHT’S TALE

Somewhere between Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and Monty Python and the Holy Grail lies Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale — too bad it’s as funny as the former and as poetic as the latter. William Thatcher (hunk-of-the-day Heath Ledger), a peasant squire, sees an opportunity to pursue his ambitions to be a champion jouster when his knight kicks the bucket before a key match. His two oafish sidekicks grudgingly go along and aid him in an unfunny pratfall-filled training montage. But there remains the problem of class: to compete he needs the bona fides of noble birth. Enter stark-naked struggling bard Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany, who bares his ass far more than can be to anyone’s benefit). A gambling addict with a need for quick cash, “Jeff” agrees to forge the necessary papers and serve as Thatcher’s PR flack.

Now that class struggle and Western literature have been debased, all that’s left is the music of Queen — “We Will Rock You” plays whenever the tilting begins. That anachronism is almost amusing; less so are the Disneyesque motifs of self-fulfillment and feeble feminist empowerment embodied by aristocratic Jocelyn (Shanynn Sossamon, in an assortment of boob-baring Elle-ish regalia). The film’s fanfare for the common man is all hypocritical piffle — true, the bad guy is the weasly Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell), but in the end William must be saved from the fickle mob by royal intervention. Still, it’s nice to know that the WWF or its equivalent would thrive in any historical epoch.

— Peter Keough