Black Knight: Movie Review, DVD Review (2001)

(Originally published 2001)

Directed by Gil Junger, written by Darryl Quarrles, Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow, 95 minutes, rated PG-13.

Hopping onto the short list of last year's worst movies is Gil Junger's "Black Knight," the stunningly bad Martin Lawrence comedy about a theme park employee who reaches into a moat to retrieve a chunky gold necklace--and is inexplicably transported back to 14th-century England for his trouble.

The film, certainly one of the laziest comedies Hollywood cranked out last year, is a cynical, unfunny, run-of-the-dump disaster whose one-joke premise consistently hits an uninspired wall of stupidity and falls flat on its medieval butt in the process.

After bombing earlier last year with Sam Weisman's "What's the Worst that Could Happen?," Lawrence finds out exactly what can happen when your legendary ego becomes bigger than your talent: You spin out one bad movie after another and gradually lose your audience.

His latest, a crude cross between "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," "Just Visiting," "A Knight’s Tale" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," stars the actor as Jamal Walker, an inner-city flunky who zips into the past and finds himself in the middle of a Middle Age conspiracy, one that involves the murder of a king (Kevin Conway), the restoration of a queen (Helen Carey) and a whole lot of sex in between.

The amazing lack of attention Jamal draws as he struts through this world of knights and skullduggery is one of the film’s biggest oversights. Wearing jeans and a bright green football jersey, he’s greeted and treated as just another Moore from Normandy. Not Normandy, France, mind you--but the corner of Normandie and Florence, the infamous location of the L.A. riots where Rodney King was beaten by police.

With Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason and Vincent Regan in supporting roles, "Black Knight" is a black mark against Martin Lawrence’s career.

Grade: F

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