Thanks entirely to the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Hollywood became instantly enamored with the blockbuster historical epic. Audiences know a bandwagon when they see one, though, which is why Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy was the only one to earn more money, while none of them found comparable critical acclaim and awards season glory. Some of them were great, others were terrible, with Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur existing somewhere in the middle.
A 31 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 59 percent user rating is desperately uninspiring, while a $203 million haul at the box office on a $120 million budget ensured that the gritty retelling of Arthurian legend was nowhere near a bomb, even if it wasn’t quite a certifiable success either.
Stripping the tale of its fantastical elements was an admirable creative choice, if not exactly a successful one given how crushingly dull the majority of King Arthur‘s 126 minutes turned out to be. And yet, 18 years after its release, Redditors still can’t comprehend how one of the most impressive ensembles of the decade conspired to combine their talents to yield nothing but mediocrity.
The battle sequences were fine, and there was a smattering of memorable work from the ensemble, but Clive Owen was fatally miscast in the title role, and that effect trickled downwards. You know something is seriously wrong when the combined might of Owen, Ioan Gruffudd, Joel Edgerton, Hugh Dancy, Ray Winstone, Mads Mikkelsen, Ray Stevenson, Keira Knightley, Stephen Dillane, Stellan Skarsgard, Til Schweiger, Graham McTavish and more struggle to elevate banal material.
It was a massive missed opportunity, then, with the dark and dreary aesthetic of King Arthur seeping into every element of the production.
