King Arthur

This - or at least the director's cut version, which I saw - was surprisingly satisfying in patches. Clive Owen always brings a certain something, and his turn as Arthur, reimagined as a Roman centurion commanding a group of Salmatian [?] 'knights' south of Hadrian's wall in partly-conquered Britain, is no exception - he has a suitable controlled ferocity, as well as the gravitas that almost allows one to take seriously all the speechifying about free will and destiny...but parts of the film just don't ring true, and that's where it falls down - there are too many false notes (the real classics of the genre - the Bravehearts and the Gladiators - don't have any), abovementioned explicitly fixation on freedom and individual liberty being one particularly intrusive example (it's a perfectly fine theme, but the problem arises when the characters continually talk directly about it, particularly when said talk's in platitudes). Still, a fun enough film (in that oh-so-serious kind of way).