King Arthur

**1/2 – Purported to be a more factual representation of current theory regarding the origins of the myths involving the Knights of the Round Table, 2004’s “King Arthur” moves the setting of the classic tales from medieval times to a 5th century England that is dominated by warring groups of Romans, Saxons and Picts. Clive Warren is cast in this as the titular monarch who is a part-Roman/part-Celtic magistrate in charge of a group of Sarmatian indentured servants (the famous Knights, including Lancelot, Galahad, etc.) who go around Roman controlled Britain fighting off hordes of barbarian invaders. While there is some historical basis for many of the aspects of this revision to the story, anyone with a fair amount of historical knowledge of the period could have a field day pointing out the inaccuracies and anachronisms. For the sake of brevity I’m not going to do that, but rest assured the falsehoods and fallacies were egregious and plentiful. That doesn’t necessarily make this a bad movie, but the fact that the narration at the beginning very clearly makes that claim that this is the ‘real’ story makes the extreme artistic latitude taken by the filmmakers quite annoying. Even if you have no interest in the debate over the historical accuracy of anything that is shown here, viewing it unmarred by side-taking still yields the result of this being only a mediocre film. It has lots of action in it and each battle is introduced with a goofy rousing speech by Arthur that gets really old. The characters are pretty stereotypical and the dialogue is throwaway motivational nonsense. It has plenty of swordplay, though, so if that is good enough for you, knock yourself out.