Somehow, the audience is supposed to be drawn into the medieval ages with Jamal (Martin Lawrence), a present-day employee at the Medieval World amusement park. He is a goofy, thoughtless person, and that's further established by his boss, who acts like his mother and is ashamed of his selfishness. With this, the chances of the movie becoming a cheap copy of It's a Wonderful Life become greater and greater. Jamal happens to find a mysterious jewel on the Medieval World grounds, and seconds later, finds himself in fourteenth century England.

      The green football jersey-wearing black man standing amidst authentic medieval English citizens is good for a chuckle, but any attempt to make the story believable is completely out of the question. No one in medieval England questions how Jamal looks or why he acts so differently, and everyone seems to speak with a strikingly similar dialect to today's American English. The people believe Jamal is from Normandy, so everything outrageous he does is because "he's French." That, like most of the movie's jokes, lasts for a very short time. Even the science behind his time travel is never rationalized, and the ending even suggests a Wizard of Oz-type explanation (which is now being taught as the storytelling method not to use).

      The writers clearly didn't care about that. Instead, they focused on giving Martin Lawrence funny ways of tormenting the boring fourteenth century white folk. In the middle, though, they must have run out of funny ideas, so they decided to turn the movie into a somewhat serious story about courage and Good Samaritan-ism. A rebellion had been forming against King Leo (Kevin Conway, Thirteen Days), and the commoners think that Jamal is heaven-sent revolutionary who will help them overtake their ruthless king. This more serious element and the inclusion of Sir Knolte, well played by Tom Wilkinson (The Patriot), almost works -- if not for the already ludicrous plotline and childish jokes played out by Lawrence in the first act.

      Black Knight went wrong very early, and the hardest thing to swallow about it is Lawrence's role as an employee of a medieval-themed amusement park and his boss's almost maternal relationship to him. Early in the movie, she helps establish Jamal's character flaws, and had she been an important person in Jamal's life and not merely the manager of Medieval World, the rest of the movie might have been more acceptable. Alas, most of the film is borderline preposterous, and by the time things get serious and the audience is supposed to really care what's going on, they've drifted off to sleep.

      Of course, the movie was first conceived as a star vehicle for Martin Lawrence, and he can carry a film (see 1999's Blue Streak). His opening scene and some of the antics he pulls off in the fourteenth century deliver some smiles, but again, by the time the plot gets serious, the smiles turn to straight-faced looks of boredom.

      Even with a surprise ending, Black Knight had already doomed itself to a short life in theaters and a long, dusty existence on video shelves -- which is probably where the movie should have gone straight to in the first place.

Andy Zientek, 2001