









It all sounded so good on paper. Director Guy Ritchie, who reimagined Sherlock Holmes as a smart scrapper played by Robert Downey Jr., wanted to do a fresh take on the King Arthur legend. He cast Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam as the born king, raised in a brothel on the mean streets of medieval Londinium. Then Ritchie got Jude Law to play the self-hating evil mage king Vortigern. Plus there would be Iron Age street fights, giant monsters, and swords! How could it go wrong? Yeah, about that...

The frustrating thing about watching King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is that you can almost reconstruct the perfectly decent movies it could have been. Ritchie has a great visual style, Hunnam is fun as this new version of Arthur who grew up as a city rat instead of a farm boy, and Law can chew scenery like nobody's business. But in almost every scene, the action is undermined by weird edits that turn the whole affair into the narrative equivalent of four-year-old holiday fruitcake.

Consider the first scene that introduces us to the grown-up Arthur, still ignorant of his true identity, who rules nothing more than a group of gangsters with some kind of vague protection racket. One of Arthur's cop buddies asks the future king how he got into a fight with some Vikings, and Arthur proceeds to spin a long yarn about everything he did that morning leading up to the fight. But instead of cutting to the fight, or even just skipping ahead to the (fiery) consequences, Arthur keeps retelling the story with new embellishments and irritating voiceovers that clog up the action. Why did we need to spend two minutes hearing how Arthur and his gang shook down a fur merchant before the Viking bit? Instead of seeing the fight, we get a glimpse of it, then a bit of Arthur and his friends guffawing, then a bit of fight, then more "jokes," until it's like listening to your drunk uncle retell a story that was boring the first time.

I guess you could argue that the scene is funny and that it sets up Arthur as a regular guy. And that would possibly even be true if pretty much every other action scene in the film weren't staged in the same way. We move from a room full of guys planning an attack to seeing the attack, to watching them plan, to hearing voiceover about how the attack went, to seeing another random bit of the attack that happened earlier. It's like nothing actually ever happens. Instead, we hear about how it's going to happen, and then after a few confusing snippets of FX-blurred action, it's over. There's even a series of giant monster fights that are spliced together so ineptly that giant bats defeated in a previous scene re-appear to be defeated again.

Continuity in this film is a complete joke. Characters we've seen in one place show up hundreds of miles away without explanation. A person we're supposed to desperately care about is sacrificed, but unfortunately we've never met her before, so why does it matter that she's dead? My favorite moment of awfulness came when Arthur and his loyal men have all been hanging out in this hideout for several scenes, making plans to attack Vortigern. Then, suddenly, Arthur introduces them all to each other. Wait, they've been living and scheming together all this time without being introduced? The whole movie reeks of terrible, terrible editing.

At a certain point, you just want director Ritchie to tell the story without all the weird time-shifted edits. Kill the giant rats, then kill the giant bats, THEN kill the giant wolves. Introduce your friends to each other, then make a plan, THEN GIVE US SOME UNMEDIATED ACTION. I am not a picky movie watcher—you may recall that I love cheesefests like The Great Wall and the silly xXx sequel . But King Arthur isn't so bad it's good, nor is it just mindless fun. It's dreary and boring.

Even the fight scenes are dull, shrouded in dust, and janky with slo-mo. Honestly, the sword-wielding situation was so meh that I found myself obsessing over the few little things that hadn't been blobbed up by CGI—such as Hunnam's peculiarly missing butt. I know that sounds weird, but once you notice something like that, you can't un-notice. How did he lose his butt? Was it the workout regimen? An illusion created by medieval pants? Something more dire?

Even worse: I couldn't shake the feeling that this started out as a cool take on the King Arthur story as a heist tale with streetwise knights. There is a genuinely great scene where Arthur is putting together his strategy and the guys are looking at a map of a walled town. Suddenly, we get this Ocean's 11 feeling as they mark the exits, come up with escape routes, and start figuring out arrow trajectories from different windows. It feels like we're watching a team of experts in every badass medieval skill needed to pull off the ultimate steal-the-mage-tower job. Wouldn't you have loved a King Arthur heist? Me too! It would have been an original perspective on a very old story.

Maybe that was the movie that Ritchie wanted to make, or maybe he was aiming for something more stately and Excalibur-esque. Unfortunately, whatever it was got so scabby and confused and awkward in the editing process that we'll never know.