Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Blu-ray Movie Review

Camelot (Not)

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 10, 2017

Both creatively and financially, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a disaster. Warner must have realized it had a flop on its hands by the time the first trailer premiered at 2016's Comic-Con, because the theatrical release was almost immediately booted into the following year. Then the studio kept shifting the film around the 2017 calendar, as if tinkering with the schedule has ever salvaged a stinker. When King Arthur finally appeared in May 2017, it was predictably shunned by audiences, earning less than its $175 million production cost in worldwide ticket sales (and that’s without accounting for the additional tens of millions that Warner must have spent on prints and advertising). Add one more to Warner’s growing list of recent box office duds.

Warner's Blu-ray release strategy seems to be mirroring the film's theatrical debacle, with Blu-ray screeners delayed until the last minute (although it’s unlikely that further bad reviews could make the film's reputation worse than it already is). And while King Arthur is being released in multiple formats, the studio has elected not to send out 3D screeners for review. When you've lost as much money on a film as Warner has on King Arthur, I guess every little economy helps.

King Arthur's erratic script is credited to director Ritchie, his producing partner Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold, co-author of the original screen story. Harold shows up in the Blu-ray extras gamely trying to look enthusiastic, but we'll have to wait for his upcoming Robin Hood tale starring Kingsman's Taron Egerton to find out whether he's any good at writing fantasy epics. The script for King Arthur on which Harold worked was reportedly heavily rewritten, and the final product is loaded with signature elements from Ritchie's and Wigram's prior oeuvre. King Arthur was initially pitched as Lord of the Rings meets Ritchie's Snatch, and the finished product borrows liberally from both sources, with swooping scenes of CG-enhanced landscapes, mythical creatures and massive battles (everyone wants to be Peter Jackson) alternating with anachronistic dialogue that sounds like it was lifted from a Cockney gangster film. Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) is now a street fighter, brothel keeper and leader of a band of bantering lads straight out of Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Add a sword that everyone wants to possess and whose powers and effects on the bearer are eerily reminiscent of Rings' almighty "Precious", plus a Star Wars-style hero's journey complete with an absent father and a confrontation with the Dark Side—and the result is a derivative mish-mash that keeps announcing its grandeur without any idea of how to achieve something grand.

Every so often, Ritchie and Wigram throw in a reminder of the authentic Arthurian legend so memorably depicted in John Boorman's Excalibur, as if to remind themselves and the audience that they're supposed to be retelling a classic. Thus, the sword of the title is still called Excalibur, but it has acquired a disjointed magical back story that detracts from the sense of mystery while adding nothing to the plot. We get copious references to the wizard Merlin, who is traditionally Arthur's mentor, but here he remains off screen for the entire film, dispatching instead a junior "Mage" (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) to supply Delphic pronouncements while upping the cast's limited feminine quotient (but only slightly; this is a movie dominated by lads). The Lady of the Lake (Jacqui Ainsley) makes a brief appearance, but who knew that she lived in a mud puddle? Members of Arthur's band bear the names of future Knights of the Round Table (though Lancelot is notably omitted), and the famous table itself makes a late appearance as the occasion for an over-extended joke when no one except Arthur understands what it is or why he's building it. ("It's a table", Arthur explains helpfully. "You sit at it.")

Arthur's illustrious father, Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana), has been given a duplicitous brother, Vortigern (Jude Law), who, in a plot element lifted from Shakespeare, murders the king for his crown. Unlike Hamlet's Claudius, however, this usurper doesn't marry the queen, because he already has a wife and family, which he sacrifices to a mysterious squid-like creature beneath the castle in return for immense but ill-defined power. (It has something to do with the tower he's building that's topped by flames recalling the Eye of Sauron.) The prophesying female heads on the sinister cephalopod are an obvious echo of Macbeth's witches, and the entity is somehow linked to the evil wizard Mordred (Rob Knighton), with whom Vortigern studied as a boy.

Or something like that. King Arthur's ramshackle mythology is so poorly explained that it's frequently unclear who Arthur's real enemy is. Reports that Ritchie's initial cut ran three and a half hours suggest that exposition may have been sacrificed in favor of stunt sequences and CGI, but it's also possible that Ritchie and Wigram just never bothered to work out the details of their crowd-sourced folklore. Editor James Herbert, who cut Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes adaptations and his Man from U.N.C.L.E. remake, does his best to paper over the narrative gaps with gimmicky jumps backward and forward in time, often within the same sequence. While the trick has worked in other Ritchie films, here it only emphasizes King Arthur's fundamental incoherence.

Charlie Hunnam can be an appealing performer, but he's utterly lost in an ill-defined role. Much has been written about how dutifully the actor trained to achieve his shredded physique, which Ritchie takes every excuse to show off. But in the Sixth Century, they didn't have trainers, gyms or mixed martial arts, and Hunnam's chiseled figure is every bit as incongruous as the class warfare that erupts between Arthur's proletarian band and the upperclass twits inhabiting Vortigern's court. All of Ritchie's familiar preoccupations get tossed into King Arthur, and none of them belongs in Camelot.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Ritchie reunited with his Man from U.N.C.L.E. cinematographer John Mathieson, who knows his way around shooting fantasy epics from photographing Gladiator  and Robin Hood for Ridley Scott and Pan for Joe Wright. The production was shot digitally (on the Arri Alexa, according to IMDb), and Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray exhibits all the usual advantages of a big-budget studio production acquired and completed entirely in the digital domain. Blacks are solid, detail and sharpness have the clarity that contemporary viewers take for granted, and the image is free of noise, interference or artifacts, with the exception of some minor banding so fleeting that it probably won't be noticed. King Arthur is a dark film for the most part, and its palette has been heavily desaturated, a phenomenon now so frequent in current filmmaking that it may be due for retirement. (I suspect it's a boon to the effects team.) Eruptions of yellow flame and mystical light of various hues are accentuated, as are the greens in forest and countryside (shot in Scotland) when Arthur and his band are on the run. Still, even with the color leached out of the image, it's hard not to notice that the wardrobe fabrics and many of the props look modern and machine-made. Even a talented DP like Mathieson can't compensate for casually anachronistic production design.

Warner has mastered King Arthur with an average bitrate of 24.23, which is par for the course from the theatrical group. The encode has been capably performed.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

King Arthur arrives on Blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos track, and for once Warner's theatrical group hasn't wasted any digital real estate on a redundant DTS-HD MA track (see, e.g., Kong: Skull Island, The LEGO Batman Movie and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them). If the film itself weren't so mind-numbing, the Atmos mix would be an exciting experience, immersing us in attacks by huge armies and mystical beasts and plunging us into the hubbub of medieval village streets and forests filled with dark forces. The sound mixers make the most of scenes that involve magical intrusions, such as the alternate reality into which Arthur is swept when he wields Excalibur or Vortigern's encounters with the mystical squid in its underground moat (the latter speaks in many voices, which dart and weave around the room) or Arthur's encounter with the Lady of the Lake. Dynamic range is broad, bass extension is deep, and the dialogue is clearly rendered, although some of the accents may challenge American ears. In the film's early scenes, the dialogue appears to be slightly out of sync, but this issue disappears after ten minutes or so. The propulsive action score is the work of Daniel Pemberton, reuniting with Ritchie after The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras focus on technical and logistical elements, largely avoiding discussion of story, theme or character.

• Arthur with Swagger (1080p; 1.78:1; 9:41).


• Sword from the Stone (1080p; 1.78:1; 18:49).


• Parry and Bleed (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:44).


• Building on the Past (1080p; 1.78:1; 14:00).


• Inside the Cut: The Action of King Arthur (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:08).


• Camelot in 93 Days (1080p; 1.78:1; 10:23).


• Legend of Excalibur (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:05).


• Scenic Scotland (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:33).


• Introductory Trailers: At startup, the disc plays a trailer for Dunkirk, plus the familiar Warner promo for 4K discs.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

King Arthur was supposed to inaugurate a six-film franchise, but those sequels have now been scrapped. While the Blu-ray is technically proficient, the film is little more than a two-hour compilation of stunts, effects and occasional fits of attitude. Not recommended.