Review – King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

The legend of King Arthur gets the Guy Ritchie treatment in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, a boring, dumb, CGI heavy bomb that tells us nothing about new about Arthur and Excalibur.

In this re-invention of the classic tale, Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) comes up the hard way in the back alleys of the city, living in a brothel and learning how to fight and survive on his own.  When his uncle Vortigern (Jude Law) summons everyone in the land to pull a mysterious sword from a stone, Arthur realizes there may be more to his life than he thinks, as he is the only person to pull the sword from the stone.  He must use the power of the sword to find his true legacy while saving the kingdom.

For a movie titled Legend of the Sword, we don’t really learn much about how and where Excalibur came from.  We get a brief introduction into how it ended up in the stone, but the only explanation we get as to why this sword is so great is that it was a gift from the great wizard, Merlin.  Yeah, no shit a sword given to you by Merlin is going to be special, he’s a goddamn wizard.  Wizards don’t give base model gifts.  A better movie would have been about Merlin making the sword and why he gave it the powers that he did and why he gave it to the people that he did.  But, I’m not in Hollywood, so what do I know.

The power the sword possess is just dumb.  It essentially turns Arthur super saiyan by slowing down time and allowing Arthur to slice through and destroy everything in his path, which seems like a very Guy Ritchie move to me.  It’s like this aspect of the sword was placed in here so that Ritchie could do all of the fun visual stuff he is known for rather than focus on making a good movie with character development.  The best moment in the film is the most grounded and character driven one, where Arthur is telling one of Vortigern’s men about an incident that happened with some vikings.  It is quickly edited, amusing, and fun, and gives more character depth than any other scene in the movie.  I wish the movie had more scenes like this.

I’ll be frank, I am not a fan of Charlie Hunnam as an actor.  Since I first saw him in the dreadful The Ledge (2011), he’s always rubbed me the wrong way.  I never watched Sons of Anarchy (2008 – 2014), which I’ve heard he’s great in, but the only movie I liked him in was James Gray’s Lost City of Z (2017), though I feel that has more to do with Gray’s ability to flesh out great performances and less on Hunnam’s talent.  Hunnam is so bland as our titular king.  He just bulldozes his way through the movie with his sword and muscles with no depth to his character and no emotion shown at all.  Jude Law is far to talented for this movie and you can tell he is bored as hell playing Vortigern.  I did enjoy seeing the wonderful Djimon Hounsou as Bedivere and had a blast with Aiden Gillen’s sharp shooting Bill, but neither of these actors were in the movie long enough to make an impact.

It’s only week two of the summer movie season and we already have a candidate for the worst movie of the summer.  King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a lifeless, CGI-heavy, style-over-substance action flick that wastes the talents of some good actors.

MY RATING – 1/4

Did you see King Arthur: Legend of the Sword?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.