A (very) schoolboy comedy carried at arm’s length by a Martin Lawrence more elastic than ever, “The Black Knight” and its delirious pitch prances in the top 10 of the most viewed films on the Netflix platform.
Jamal Walker is a modest employee of Medieval World, an amusement park on the theme of the Middle Ages that the public has been ignoring for ages. One day while cleaning the moat, Jamal falls into the water and wakes up in the heart of 14th century England.
A stranger in this most hostile land, Jamal befriends a fallen knight, discovers love with Victoria, a beautiful young woman with very modern ideas, and supports the peasants in their fight against a cruel sovereign…
Beneath this delirious pitch playing thoroughly and above all without an ounce of complex the card of anachronism and travel through time, is the film The Black Knight. A comedy (who could doubt it by the way?) carried at arm’s length by a Martin Lawrence more elastic than ever and with an unstoppable patter, which prances in the top 10 of the most watched films on Netflix at the moment.
For what reason anyway? Want to get away? To treat yourself to a good slice of regressive laughter? The magic of algorithms bringing up ex Bad Boy Marcus Burnett from the bottom of the catalog? Maybe all of these at once…
Released just a year after Big Mamma, in which Lawrence, an FBI agent, disguised himself as (big) Mamma to obtain a confession from a witness, The Black Knight therefore remains in the vein of the register which made the glory of the actor, by offering a variation of a much older work, A Yankee at the court of King Arthur, based on a novel by Mark Twain published in 1889.
A satirical and humorous work that presented 6th century England and its medieval culture through the eyes of Hank Morgan, a 19th century Connecticut resident who, after a blow to the head, awakens to find himself inexplicably transported to the era of King Arthur. Centuries pass, humor remains.
Twentieth Century Fox
Still, the emoluments touched by Lawrence to make The Black Knight were as royal as King Leo in the movie: $20 million. But the task that fell to him in exchange for this astronomical fee was difficult, not to say thankless: to make the American public laugh, convalescent and traumatized by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which occurred barely three months earlier…
But the impossible, no one is held. The film was a big box office failure, not only in the United States, but also internationally, not even making $40 million on a $50 million production budget.