★½​

(M) 126 minutes



Guy Ritchie is English, and so was King Arthur, but that doesn't make the director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels a particularly apt choice to retell the story of Camelot.

The first chapter in a mooted blockbuster series, King Arthur: Legend of The Sword is a bewildering mix of solemn hokum and standard Ritchie laddishness – as if he had set out to make a different film from the one he always makes, then given up halfway through.

Against a relatively sombre medieval backdrop, the young Arthur (Charlie Hunnam​) is portrayed as an amiable chancer who favours exclamations such as "Bollocks!" and is always up for a brawl with the local Vikings.