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80An engrossing, highly intelligent reimagining of the legend of Arthur.
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75Not 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.
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75An action film without a completely empty head, and these days, that's as rare as Excalibur itself.
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70If 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.
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70Impressively 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.
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70The film boasts all the hallmarks of the '50s historic epic save the presence of Tony Curtis.
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70By going back to its origins and dusting itself off, the King Arthur story has proved itself to have a very contemporary resonance.
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67In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.
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63Overall, 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.
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63Forget 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.
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63For 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.
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63King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.
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60Conceptually compelling, but the interest ends there, in part because the humans get squeezed to the margins in favor of pseudo-history and clashing battleaxes.
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58While Keira Knightley brightens things up as Guinevere, the casting is otherwise lackluster.
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50Strains credulity at every turn.
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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.
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50This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.
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50I'd gladly take the legend over this dreary pseudo-historical mumbo jumbo.
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50Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).
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50Fuqua 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.
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50Everything 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.
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50If 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.
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50A 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.
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50Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.
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40An Arthurian tale minus everything the average person knows or cares about Arthur and his knights.
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40Thankfully, 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.
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40Nothing 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.
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40King 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.
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40It'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.
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40Unfortunately, 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.
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40The 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.
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38Too 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.
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38There, 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.
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38If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?
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30King 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.
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30Bleak, 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.
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30The result is your basic Bruckheimer action spectacle plus lots of leather, shaggy haircuts, and Celtic tattoos.
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25The 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.
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25In 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.
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Positive: 30 out of 57
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Mixed: 10 out of 57
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Negative: 17 out of 57
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