Prince Valiant 1997

I took a slight detour on my MCU catch up when I was asked by my friend Todd over at the Forgotten Filmcast to guest on another episode and his suggestion for a forgotten film to cover was the 1954 Prince Valiant movie as it was based on comic strip. While I initially excluded movies based on comic strips, I later decided to include serialized comic strips that tell a continuous story and still exclude comics that are all essentially stand-alone comedic strips, but I still haven’t fully dug into what that all entails. But Prince Valiant as a comic strip is the longest running continuous story comic strips which started in 1937 and is still running in a half page format today which is over 4,600 comics! Anyway back to the movie, when I actually went to watch the movie I found and watched the 1997 version of Prince Valiant thinking it was the version that he suggested. The day after watching it, I realized my mistake, but I thought the movie was crazy enough to warrant me talking about it so he graciously shifted to allow us to discuss this movie instead of the 1954 version. This movie has an interesting cast with several well known names and character actors, it did go to some bizarre places especially in the second half and it felt like it was trying to be a comedy but lean into it, which if IMDb trivia is to be believed, that’s because the studio took charge of the editing without the director and tried to make it less comedic. I can’t sit here and say that this was a great movie, but it was a lot of fun.

Prince Valiant is an interesting dynamic. He is thrown into the mix of the King Arthur mythology without ever really being a true part of it, so he’s more or less a side story in the legend. For this movie, it takes place after Merlin has died, but Morgan Le Fay is still alive and working for the Vikings. They rob Merlin’s grave for his spellbook and sneak into Camelot castle during a big tournament so they can steal Excalibur. At this point in Valiant’s career, he’s a squire for Sir Gawain but takes Gawain’s armor during the tournament after he becomes too injured to continue and posing as Gawain manages to defeat Prince Arn. This attracts the attention of Princess Ilene and King Arthur, and while Arthur’s armies prepare to go to war with the framed Scots, Valiant is tasked with escorting Ilene back to Wales. Miscellaneous adventures ensue and during the trip, Ilene and Valiant of course manage to fall in love with each other.

Stephen Moyer plays the titular Valiant and he does a decent enough job, but there’s not really a whole lot of personality to him. He doesn’t have the impertinent sense of honor and courage that William did in A Knight’s Tale, he mostly fumbles around and succeeds by a mixture of quick thinking and dumb luck. He’s never presented as an extremely skilled fighter, but he does hold his own in the various fight scenes throughout the movie. Princess Ilene played by Katherine Heigl is also relatively generic and a muddled character. She is almost immediately intrigued by Valiant while he’s wearing Gawain’s armor despite being betrothed to his opponent Arn, but there’s also an addition that she asks Valiant-posing-as-Gawain to help her become a knight herself. A story thread that doesn’t really end up going anywhere as she does get into a couple fights, but she also spends half the movie as a damsel in distress so it never really picks a lane. The villains of the movie fare a bit better, Udo Kier plays the Viking king Sligon the Usurper and there’s also his son Thagnar who is the leader of the Viking troops and Joanna Lumley plays Morgan Le Fay who is manipulating them to become the woman behind the throne. The three of them are all so over the top in the best way. There’s also a couple interesting side characters, Ron Perlman plays a random bandit who kind of kidnaps Ilene on the way to Wales but also returns late in the movie to reveal to Valiant that he is actually the son of the true king of Thule, and Warwick Davis plays a mischievous one-eyed squire who ends up tagging along in the third act as well.

Where the movie really goes bonkers is that final third act. Valiant makes his way to Thule where Sligon and the other villains are with Excalibur, he finds out that he’s the heir to the Thule kingdom based on his red stallion medallion. Thagnar kills his father by impaling him on the hilt of Excalibur which had embedded itself into the stone floor. Valiant and Ilene get captured and suspended above a pit with two giant, armored alligators. And they manage to escape after Warwick Davis gets catapulted into the castle and finds a container of sleeping powder labelled “qualuudium” which he uses on the gators. Valiant eventually defeats Thagnar in a duel, but Ilene gets killed in the fight only to be revived by Excalibur itself once Valiant prays for her life. The third act is just one ridiculous set piece after another and as long as you’re willing to roll with it, it’s fantastic and worth a watch. While there was a clear attempt to downplay the comedy, it still peeks out through the ridiculous situations and allows for a lot of laughs. The romance subplot was fairly sub-par but there’s still enough fun to be had that it’s not the worst way to spend an hour and a half, plus it’s currently available on several free streaming services. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.