The Kid Who Would Be King is a 2019 film from writer-director Joe Cornish which imagines 21st Century school kids taking on the mantle of Arthur and his knights. A ny synopsis will make it sound like a rather generic children’s story, and I suppose that’s because it is , but for the most part it’s a likeable one and bounces along pretty entertainingly. Alex (Louis George Serkis) is our Once and Future Tween. He finds Excalibur embedded in a lump of concrete in a building site like enchanted rebar and, having pulled it out, is contacted by an eccentric teen Merlin (Angus Imrie) who explains that the ancient evil once harnessed by the sorceress Morgana is on the rise again because the world is so divided and conflict-ridden. (I must confess, I had some trouble with this - is the world really more divided and conflict-ridden than it was in the Cold War? Or the 1930s? Or 1914? Where was Morgana in 1939? Loafing about in her cave I suppose… I do wonder about the wisdom of ...
Reviews and ruminations by Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines series, the Railhead trilogy, Here Lies Arthur, Goblins, and The Legend of Kevin, Pugs of the Frozen North, etc, with Sarah McIntyre.