William Tell

Bluesky

With red splashes on the credits and an even more old-fashioned voiceover we start in the middle, 20 paces slowly counted away from an infamous feat. "Three days ago my soul was free from thoughts of murder," he says, a measure before a man and boy and apple were arranged. Ignore for the moment that the eponymous William Tell is a mite more apocryphal than historical. We will gloss over the fact that the oldest version of his feat is not Swiss but Danish. Palna Toki, first of the Jomsvikings, so commanded by Harald Bluetooth whose digital namesake is similarly accursed. We'll even grant that there's something almost charming about trying to make a nationalist hero-myth into a modern and inclusive tale.

William Tell aims for thrilling action and adventure but misses the mark. Heavily indebted to Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, and with lines lifted verbatim from Theodore Martin's translation to English from the late 1890s, it struggles to distinguish itself from stories that might seem less familiar if there weren't so many borrowings. Depending on your age you may associate William Tell with another avenging figure, The Lone Ranger. Tell doesn't have a sidekick, but his villains do. Connor Swindell's Gessler is an agent of King Albert and a minor character of Schiller's, Stussi (Jake Dunn) becomes a platinum blond (if not albino) henchman. Albert 'the One-eyed', as the epiphet goes, is a Sir Ben Kingsley with a golden eyepatch bearing a gem in a sculpted socket, and his inheritor, Agnes (Jess Douglas-Welsh), joins a long list of heterochromatic villains.

That's almost anime in its styling, but in comparison to the updated invention of The War Of The Rohirrim the film isn't just unhorsed but pedestrian. Though Tell was an archer he's noted for his use of the crossbow. That's one of the few contrasts with Robin Hood. The local baddie is a bailiff and not a Sheriff but there's an arrow shot that's straight from the trailer for Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Guy Ritchie's Robin Hood had its protagonist carrying scars mental and physical from Crusades that resembled the Global War on Terror more than anything Holy, and this does too. Ridley Scott's had a go as well and William Tell does resemble his latter 'history films'.

In comparison, though, it lacks ambition, bombast, charisma. Claes Bang convinces as a weary farmer, worried father, and loving husband, but when action calls I don't think he's fit to answer. His William Tell might have a history of violence but when he's called back to the fray he can't hold a candle to John Wick or anyone else of that ilk. An ostensibly rousing speech is aiming for Braveheart but has all the grip one would expect from an address to an adhesive sales conference.

Aerial shots seem designed to get tourist board funding by promising to do for Switzerland what Middle Earth did for Aotearoa/New Zealand. There's a sense sometimes that the majestic sweeps are curtailed by things like motorways or mobile phone masts lingering just off-screen, but even glimpses of those would perhaps feel less anachronistic than other elements.

Ridley Scott's historical fables bear about as much resemblance to fact as Shakespeare's history plays, if not less. William Tell manages to reference both, but not to its credit. Macbeth might not have been the source for reference to 'unsexing', not least when it's not multitudinous seas incarnadine but bathtubs blushed by bloodshed. A more (and less) obvious is use of twigs and branches to camouflage an advance, not Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane as much as Gryon, Bern and Wald to Dudingen.

While double-checking for information on pavises, the sheltering shields associated with crossbow-users I noted the Wikipedia page then references older, larger protections. I then realised that its references to scutum and testudo might be directly responsible for seemingly anachronistic tactics in a siege. That's one whose technical elements would potentially concern scholars even before a priest engages foemen with a wrist-worn swivel-mounted pocket-crossbow.

That sort of nonsense would be more forgiveable if it was in the service of fun, but William Tell isn't. While bigger names like Jonathan Pryce add a bit of gravitas they're ballasting a work that's already leaden. The iconic arrowshot is perhaps the halfway mark of the film and it's past an hour into proceedings. Flashbacks do shed a little light on character and consequence but do nothing for pace. Nick Hamm writes and directs, and while there's plenty added to Schiller's version as with Eggers' Nosferatu one wonders if it might have been better left out. While Hamm has helmed a variety of pictures set in the more recent past this is a big jump back and the leap doesn't land.

There are some good performances, Golshifteh Farahani and Amar Chadha-Patel in particular, but Pryce and Kingsley's noble airs seem in part because we know that which surrounds is beneath them. There's some heavy handedness with symbols. If you just sipped something stronger than adam's ale every time an apple appeared on screen then you'd be unlikely to see the end credits. There's been some real effort for practical sets, but it took until a later drone shot to get a sense of geography beyond the confines of a town square. Knowing the territory is the bigger part of the problem. Call it the John Carter problem. Some characters are iconic enough that the mention of their name excites, but it's easy to mistake personal familiarity with wider cultural relevance. William Tell charts an uneasy course trying to balance folkloric defences of sovereignty with more modern European sensibilities, but finds it even harder to make its hero's journey worth watching.