King Arthur

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.