Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1975 comedy co-directed by Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam. Starring Graham Chapman and John Cleese, the film focuses on parodying King Arthur’s quest to find the Holy Grail. After being told by God to find this Grail, Arthur and his knights of the round table head out across the land in search of it. Broken up intermittently by present day scenes, the film is primarily set in the middle ages. It attempts to be a straight-faced spoof of Arthur’s quest, but ultimately ends up being no more than a sequence of skits that are connected only by a thin story.
That’s not to say that the film doesn’t end up being funny, as for the most part it still is. It’s just that there isn’t all that much to it. There are some funny scenes, but they don’t really have all that much connection to one another. They’re there just for to be funny, meaning they won’t be memorable later on. This basically makes the film something you’ll laugh at in the moment, but forget about soon afterwards.
The film opens off with likely the best credits sequence I have ever seen. Below the actual credits are captions, almost entirely unrelated to the actual credits. Shortly after these begin, the people making the credits were “fired”, and replaced with others. These new credits are also quite silly, leading to more “firings”. This opening sequence really gets the audience prepared for what laughs are to ensue for the rest of the film. Sadly, the film never quite lives up to the opening. The rest is still funny, but the laughs become fewer and farther between as it progresses, especially when the film reaches its finale.
Speaking of the ending of the film, it serves as the film’s low-point. It isn’t a traditional ending in any sense of the imagination, and it seems like something that was thrown together at the last-minute. I speculate that the Python group simply ran out of money, and ended up doing whatever they could to wrap up their film. The ending still does fit with the style of film that this is, but it leaves a sense of disappointment after seeing it.
The things that were not disappointing were a few select skits that filled me with a great sense of joy. The most memorable portion of the film, for me at least, was a killer rabbit. I’ll try not to give much away about it, due to not wanting to destroy part of the experience, but suffice to say this rabbit is the best part of the film. Absolutely, without a doubt, the most memorable, funny and exciting part of the film is minute or so that the little bunny rabbit is on the screen.
The film attempts to do almost everything different from what would be normally expected. The rabbit being far deadlier than expected is just one example of this. Peasants seem well-educated, characters you’d expect to be serious never are, characters who are supposed to be dead aren’t, and some are even invincible. Completely inverting every typical cliché is something that the film does very well. These are the times when the film becomes the most fun. The times when it suffers, is when it tries to be something else.
When Monty Python and the Holy Grail attempts to have quotable one-liners, or incredibly long discussions, it actually becomes fairly boring. It’s creates an interesting contrast, where something incredibly funny happened not five minutes ago, while the scene you are currently watching is making you wonder how much time is left in the film. Thankfully, these scenes don’t occur that often, but given the overall hilarity of the rest of the film, they stand out far more than you would like them to.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an interesting film, to say the least. Filmed with a very small budget, it manages to be really funny for the majority of its screen time. This budget did seem to hinder the film’s ending though, which is a shame, as it really would have been nice to have a real conclusion to Arthur’s story. The laughs it does give are fairly funny, but not really all that memorable. There are a few that I likely will remember for a while, but most of the film doesn’t stick with you. There are some dialogues that go on for too long, and it’s in these moments where the film does get boring. They don’t happen all that often though, and the film generally gets back to having a lot of fun fairly quickly.