BLACK KNIGHT []
Cheesy, cheap-looking, unfunny comedy. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG-13. At the Murray Hill, the Chelsea West, the Harlem USA, others.
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MARTIN Lawrence has been more frantic, but he’s never been more unwittingly racist as a comic character than in “Black Knight.”
If this cheesy, cheap-looking update of “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court” had been co-produced by the Ku Klux Klan itself, it could hardly be more repellently stereotypical.
In place of the Yankee who goes back in time to medieval England, you have a shiftless, mugging, leering, inarticulate L.A. black man who rolls his eyes and ambles around like one of the chimps in “Planet of the Apes.”
Martin Lawrence, fast becoming the Stepin Fetchit of our age, plays Jamal Walker, a toiler at the run-down Medieval World, and a gibbering buffoon at the best of times.
Trying to fish a gold medallion in the theme park’s fetid moat, he falls in. But when he emerges from the water, he’s in a forest glade in 14th century England.
The first person he meets is the disgraced knight Sir Knolte (Tom Wilkinson), but he’s so grubby and drunk that Jamal is convinced that he’s a deranged homeless man.
It takes a while before Jamal realizes he has entered a world of damsels in distress, knights in armor and grubby peasants.
It’s a world that’s weirdly underpopulated – even in the big battle scenes there never seem to be more than 30 extras (all of them waving obviously fake swords and plastic shields borrowed from some Renaissance Faire).
There is, however a coffee-colored love interest for Jamal, in the form of feisty Moorish lady in waiting Victoria (British actress Marsha Thomason, one of the movie’s few bright spots).
Jamal meets her when he’s mistaken for a messenger from the Duke of Normandy and allowed entrance to the local castle.
Soon he discovers that she’s part of a rebellion against the King Leo (Kevin Conway) who seized power from the legitimate Queen (Helen Carey) with the help of the sinister, steel-eyed Sir Percival (Vincent Regan).
But King Leo has taken to Jamal, after the messenger who also claims to have been a jester in Normandy, accidentally saves his life.
There are a few decent jokes scattered about, and there’s nothing wrong with the way the plot has Knolte teach Jamal honor, and Jamal help Knolte regain his self-respect.
But for the most part the filmmakers – screenwriters Darryl J. Quarles, Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow, and director Gil Junger – seem to have been inspired mainly by contempt for the audience: everything about their work feels lazy and slapdash.
And Lawrence himself has never seemed more of poor man’s Eddie Murphy – or less favored by nature: in the scene where he’s showing the Court how to get down to 20th-century rhythms it’s all too obvious that he can’t even dance.