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King Arthur
Touchstone Pictures


5.5

based on 39 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 63 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for intense battle sequences, a scene of sensuality and some language

Starring Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd, Keira Knightley, Mads Mikkelsen, Joel Edgerton, Hugh Dancy, Ray Winstone, and Ray Stevenson

A spectacular, epic tale of one man's destiny to become a king. (Touchstone Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Action \| Adventure \| Drama \| War
WRITTEN BY:	David Franzoni
DIRECTED BY:	Antoine Fuqua
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: December 21, 2004 Video: December 21, 2004 Theatrical: July 7, 2004
RUNNING TIME:	130 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA / Ireland

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

An engrossing, highly intelligent reimagining of the legend of Arthur.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Not a bad movie, although it could have been better. It isn't flat-out silly like "Troy," its actors look at home as their characters, and director Antoine Fuqua curtails the use of computer effects in the battle scenes, which involve mostly real people.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

An action film without a completely empty head, and these days, that's as rare as Excalibur itself.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Impressively made and well acted by an exceedingly attractive cast, this dark tale of ceaseless conflict is adult entertainment and will likely disappoint viewers expecting a "Camelot"-like love triangle.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The film boasts all the hallmarks of the '50s historic epic save the presence of Tony Curtis.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

If King Arthur is as magnificently ridiculous as any Bruckheimer picture, its thuggish charms, which owe as much to Monty Python as to Sam Peckinpah, more than pick up the slack.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

By going back to its origins and dusting itself off, the King Arthur story has proved itself to have a very contemporary resonance.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Forget all that accuracy business and just enjoy the movie for what it is: a large-scale, passably engrossing tale of valiant knights doing valiant deeds.

USA Today Mike Clark

For better or worse, but surely satisfying novelty needs, Jerry Bruckheimer's King Arthur is set much earlier than usual and against the crumbling Roman Empire, which may even (or not) be historically legitimate.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Overall, King Arthur sinks into a grim, gray torpor - though it's an odd, not unentertaining movie. The approach is different, if not edifying or convincing.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Conceptually compelling, but the interest ends there, in part because the humans get squeezed to the margins in favor of pseudo-history and clashing battleaxes.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

While Keira Knightley brightens things up as Guinevere, the casting is otherwise lackluster.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

Premiere Peter Debruge

I'd gladly take the legend over this dreary pseudo-historical mumbo jumbo.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Everything is pre-medieval and unwashed, but with Antoine Fuqua at the steering wheel King Arthur is still a comic book, if a little more "Classics Illustrated" in tone than we'd have the right to expect.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Fuqua deliberately downplays the fantastical in King Arthur, but the gritty faux realism wears itself out quickly. You've seen one lancing, you've seen them all.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

A nutty, often enjoyable farrago of craft and cinematic sampling, King Arthur moves fast and loose, and is almost aggressive in its absence of an original idea, in and of itself a Bruckheimer trademark.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.

New York Daily News Staff (Not credited)

This version has action, yes, but the love triangle among Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot is diluted, and there's nothing exuberant about a dutiful slog through the muck.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

If only the sum of this thunderously self-important "true story" outweighed its often fabulous parts, but it resorts to throwing up hollow icons in that most ignoble of losses, the expensive mediocrity.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Strains credulity at every turn.

Empire Ian Nathan

Nothing aligns, nothing builds, and before you know it we’re hip-deep in the big showdown -- a free-wheeling frenzy of choreographed combat that neglects to find much space for the cast.

Film Threat Clint Morris

Thankfully, the dependable Ray Winstone ("Sexy Beast") is in the film too and gives a droll, slightly-more realistic take of an uncultured abet to Arthur's side.

Time Richard Schickel

The weather is always inclement, the protagonists are all muddy when they're not bloody, King Arthur's Christianity is muscular but joyless, and Guinevere is often daubed with blue paint. No, folks, we're not in Camelot anymore.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

King Arthur is a snooze, overcast and drizzly both on location and on the pages of the script. Owen is too classy, too James Bond-handsome to realistically portray the not-yet-King Arthur.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.

Newsweek Marc Peyser

Unfortunately, none of this is very much fun. The cinematography is dark and depressing. The dialogue is stilted. And for some reason, director Antoine Fuqua has even ditched the Arthur/Guinevere/ Lancelot love triangle.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

An Arthurian tale minus everything the average person knows or cares about Arthur and his knights.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

There, in its midst, stands a freeze-dried Arthur -- stripped of his legend, shivering in the cold and wondering, like the rest of us, where in hell the magic went.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Too long and too full of itself to offer more than a few fleeting moments of entertainment. It doesn't take long for tediousness to triumph.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

Chicago Reader Hank Sartin

The result is your basic Bruckheimer action spectacle plus lots of leather, shaggy haircuts, and Celtic tattoos.

Slate David Edelstein

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept, but it's an endless source of giggles once you realize that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The movie gives us a Round Table and a flashing Excalibur but no magic, no mystery, no mythic resonance. Mostly there's a lot of slashing swordplay that should appeal to the picture's target audience of young males.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

In King Arthur, everything goes wrong. The film combines the plodding sincerity of a Ph.D. dissertation with the brains of a high-concept Jerry Bruckheimer- produced blockbuster (which it is), and no one benefits.

The average user rating for this movie is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 63 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

[Anonymous] gave it a6:
I've seen worse. But then again, I've seen a lot better than this. Terrible dialogue, besides Clive Owen and Ian Gruffod, as well as Ray Winstone at times. And also at times, who gives a shit? This film has some terrible parts to it. However, there are some things I liked, and things that I found, dare I say it, cool.

[Anonymous] gave it a1:
Complete rubbish. They attempted to present a gritty, realistic portrayal of King Arthur but instead they gave us the same cliched Hollywood flick we've seen a million times already. They've reduced King Arthur and his Knights into one-dimensional characters: unappealing and boring! Sir Lancelot, Guinevere, and the others get minimal airtime and are left underdeveloped. The battle scenes are atrocious. Characters usually fight one-on-one, which completely takes away from the chaotic, epic battle experience, seen in other movies like Lord of the Rings, that the film wanted to portray. And the love scene between King Arthur and Guinevere is pointless. Overall, a very bad movie.

Wolf gave it a7:
Now this movie was decent. It Offers a darker side of the tale as other reviewers have said and it has good action sequences as other reviewers have said. Now for everybody who things that this is anticatholic please shut up. During this time the catholics were on a rampage of rubbing out paganism so catholism would be the only recognized practice. I agree completely with guy. This is how the Catholics were in these times so get used to it. I think that some parts in the film seemed to have dragged on a bit and some parts to the myth weren't really addressed so i give this movie a 7. Not bad but could have done better.

Guy! gave it a7:
All in all, I liked this movie, although it got really dull and hard to understand at times. I know this movie puts down Roman Catholicism in a number of parts, but it's not offensive. I'm sorry you feel offended James, but face the truth: the Roman Catholic church did do a lot of things like that at the time.

James M. gave it a0:
Complete,abseloute rubbish.All i thought of this film was a complete anti catholic load of nonsense!Clive Owen (King Arthur) was a complete nerd who i wish died in the first battle scene.In all of Rome and Greece would fancy a gaul!!!

James T. gave it a0:
This Movie was a disaster.It was completely anti-catholic.The catholic characters had completely ridiculous accents. Whereas Clive Owen sounded like a computer programmer from London on a 5 day work do to Scotland.

Aaron M. gave it a7:
Confusing, and often a little hard to follow. There are some great fight scenes in this movie though, and I liked the new take on the story of King Arthur.

King Arthur Touchstone Pictures

King Arthur
Touchstone Pictures