King Arthur has always been ground zero for conventional "Chosen One" narratives, but this new take on King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword really leans on that element of the story to its own detriment as well as other overly derivative plot details. In this gritty take on King Arthur that ads have proclaimed "....is not your Daddy's King Arthur" (this is true, as your Father's King Arthur was likely entertaining to watch), Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) is an individual whose an obvious Han Solo/Tony Stark pastiche in that they've taken the most surface-level traits of those two beloved characters (cocky and doesn't give a hoot about others) but added none of the depth or likeable traits that filled those characters and wound up with an uninvolving protagonist in the process.
Arthur lost his parents, the King and Queen of Camelot, at a young age and ended up being raised in a Brothel. When his parents died, Vortigern (a possibly real 5th century individual played by Jude Law) assumed the throne and commanded the kingdom with an iron fist. Vortigern is cruel and nobody is able to oppose him...until Arthur pulls a sword from stone, revealing himself to the kingdom and Vortigern as the rightful king of Camelot. After a botched execution attempt, Arthur is then swept away to a cave where a group dedicated to resisting Vortigern lives and there he'll have to learn his powers and hone his craft and learn how to defeat the mystical baddie.
If you're hoping any of these resistance people will be interesting, I got bad news for you, they're all as interesting as low-grade dirt. How do you hire a great actor like Djimon Hounsou and give him so little to do? Such a proposition staggers the mind but that's just what King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword has done. Really though, it's no wonder why none of these characters resonate; their individual relationships to Arthur is muddled at best, and since it's through the dynamics between characters that we learn about them and grow to like them, none of the supporting cast leave an impact as a result. Take Hounsou's character for instance. Does he think Arthur is too brash to assume such responsibility? Does he think Arthur is their one last hope? Either of these narrative options, or plenty of others, would have been fine ways to take the character but he really has no individual perspective to offer, no goals or even wistful attitude about the pre-Vortigern days (this character worked with Arthur's dad, which surprisingly never comes up in his interactions with Arthur to my recollection). He's an expository machine and sometimes his role is expanded so he can bounce off of some forced moments of levity from this movie's version of King Arthur.
Really though, Hounsou gets the best character, if you can believe that. The sole notable woman in the entire movie, The Mage (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), is there to be subdued cheerleader for the male protagonist and also sometimes can call up crows into combat that do nothing. She's also followed around by a Falcon sometimes who's brought to life by CGI effects that seem like they were done by the same VFX team behind Birdemic: Shock And Terror. Jude Law's baddie has a couple of moments of over-the-top fun, like when he asks a question to a dismembered ear, but he gets far too little screentime and Law vanishes once the character turns into a boring CGI monster for the climax. Meanwhile, this version of King Arthur is a total mess and no matter how many times they return to the same darn flashback of his parents dying, you just never get a sense of tragedy or sympathy for this guy. This King Arthur is less of a loveable hero and more akin to the worst kind of loud-mouthed college fratboy.
Visually, King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword has nothing new to offer in the way of presenting something new and revolutionary in the way of fantasy-oriented sets, landscapes or costumes. Any one of the locations or pieces of attire adorned by the characters here could have easily come from any number of recent fantasy features. Even a sequence as conceptually bonkers as brief pointless detour into a land filled with giant CGI animals takes place in a locale that's a boring cross between Dagobah and The Elephant Graveyard. There isn't an original bone in the body of the production design here and, on a similar note, the CGI effects are surprisingly terrible. Some massive CGI elephants in the opening scene look alright but otherwise the various CGI animals (that one Falcon really does look awful) and explosions look incredibly fake.
In an attempt to make itself seem different and unique, King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword adopts a recurring trait of rapid-fire editing that typically consists of swerving back and forth between a scene of a character explaining something and another scene of action related to that exaplanation taking place. This tactic is slightly fun in an opening scene where Arthur and his hoodlum pals recount their encounter with some Vikings to a government official but for the rest of the movie, it's just more bamboozling than anything else and reduces a lot of scenes that could have just been staged in a conventional fashion to let them have more impact into being quick subpar montages. In trying to channel the spirit of Guy Ritchie's earlier movie Snatch (which also had whirlwind frenetic editing), King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword manages to once again emphasize its own lack of originality and its overall hum-drum quality.
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