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To say that great liberties were taken with `Merlin' is an understatement. This film is soooo awful that it takes Arthurian mythologies and proceeds to feed them to the paper shredder. With the exception of an excellent soundtrack, nothing can save this made-for-tv chugger from the shadows of its vastly superior predecessor `Excalibur'. Pairing Sam Neill, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Isabella Rosellini to a poor a script as this is the biggest waste of cinematic talent resources I have witnessed in years.
As if things couldn't get any worse, they had to add in annoying Martin Short's fictitous character. One can only take so much of the tastless, racist jokes he throws at them before hitting the eject button on the DVD player. I really wanted to enjoy this film badly, but that was not to be as my 12-year old daughter (who has read virtually all of the classical mythology sources for Merlin) kept pointing out the inaccuracies to me...such as how Nimue was supposed to be Merlin's mortal enemy instead of his
love interest. Merlin actually fared far worse than Arthur did, nothing like the `and they lived happily ever after' ending in the movie. Defenders of `Merlin' have also unfairly attacked `Excalibur' for using armour (which wasn't invented for another 700 years or so), while in `Merlin' they didn't as if this were a good enough reason for putting `Merlin' on top of `Excalibur'. If only they paid close attention to the TOURNAMENT scene in `MERLIN', they would have noticed the knights JOUSTING in ARMOURED
SUITS! In a nutshell, take the poor acting, script, dumbed-down dialogue, annoying Martin Short and that silly talking horse and you end up with `Excalibur' meets `Dumb and Dumber' meets `Disney' meets `Mr. Ed'. It was such a waste of my time, and probably more so for my daughter.