King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a great fantasy adventure that's stylish and funny with a fresh and interesting take on the King Arthur mythos. Charlie Hunnam gives an incredible and extremely charismatic lead performance. Djimon Hounsou and Aidan Gillen are both great and Jude Law is a terrific villiain. Guy Richtie's direction is fantastic, combining his classic trademarks and style with a grander scale. The music by Daniel Pemberton is amazing. However, it's brought down by some poor CG but it's impressive for the most part.

Guy Ritchie should stick at what he's best at. Movies like Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Rocknrolla. Those are the style movies he should make and not one about King Arthur. King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword is a big budget movie, no doubt about that, with alot of effort with the special effects, CGI's, costumes and extras. But the problem is the story and the acting. The story is just weak, and sometimes makes no sense at all. Even with all the special effects, that are nicely shot, it still remains boring to watch. The acting was just mediocre, it looked like they were reading their script all the time. Charlie Hunnam can only play Jax, his character in Sons Of Anarchy. I was literally waiting for him to step on his bike and drive away. I don't know what women see in him, his acting is very monotone and average. The acting of Astrid Bergès-Frisbey playing The Mage was also just mediocre. It looked all fake, just like the whole story. With such a high budget you would expect quality, but besides the filming and the special effects it's just below average. Disappointment!

In some what I'm not all that surprised that Guy Ritchie decided to do a King Arthur film, though I wasn't quite expecting it to be a film done in Guy Ritchie style. In a sense it sort of comes across as being his typical dark and gritty film yet in another sense it is also very much an heroic fantasy. In a way it is a shame that the film flopped the way it did because it was actually a pretty enjoyable film, and I certainly quite like Ritchie's style of directing. Okay, a part of me didn't quite get the humour of the piece, particularly since we had a similar style in all of his films. However, what we do need to remember is the Ritchies style has always been very gritty, and King Arthur is no exception.

The thing with Arthur is that there are quite a lot of stories out there, and none of them are really the same. I guess this is the nature of a legend. Interestingly some of the stories don't even have Arthur meeting Merlin (and this is the case in this film). In fact Arthur didn't even get to meet his father, but I suspect that is consistent with a lot of the legends. In this film we have the sorcerer Mordred ravaging the land, however in the aftermath of the battle, Uther's brother slays his wife to gain power, and releases a demon that kills both Uther and his wife, but allowing Arthur to go free. However, before he dies the sword, Excalibur is buried in rock and only the true born king can pull it out.

Much of the film is really about Arthur coming to terms with who he is. He grows up in a brothel and in true Guy Ritchie style, through perseverance, charm, and simple determination, basically becomes a underworld figure. However the false king suddenly discovers that as long as the sword is in the stone (and for quite a while it was underwater, however the water then drained away revealing it to all), then his power isn't going to be complete, so he sends out his troops to round up everybody Arthur's age to see if they can remove the sword. As you can probably guess Arthur succeeds. However, because is the true king, he is a threat, so he is about to be executed, except the rebels, who have been simmering around for a while, rise their heads and attack.

The other thing that the film reminded me of was Macbeth. In fact it appeared to be a retelling of the Shakespearian play using the Arthurian heroes as opposed to the Shakespearian heroes. The reason that seemed to come about was the appearance of the three witches that lived in the lake. Okay, unlike Macbeth, this film focuses more on Arthur than on the protagonist, but it seemed to come out that way a lot. However, what really grabbed my attention was that despite it being heroic fantasy, it still have the real grittiness of your typical Guy Ritchie film, and it is a real shame that it is a flop because it isn't actually as bad as the takings make it out to be (though this may have a lot more to do with the extravagant nature of the film as opposed to any inherent problems with it).