What if I told you the best King Arthur film you’ve never seen isn’t the one with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley, or even that one with Sean Connery and Richard Gere—it’s the one where Arthur talks like a Londinium gangster, a swaggering pilot for a movie series that faded to myth, just like the legendary Arthur himself.
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Okay, we all know the legend. Sword in the stone? Check. Excalibur? Well, same thing, but double check. Round table? Check. But plot twist: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword minimises its shared-legend DNA in favour of a more grounded story that makes everyday lives the most important things worth fighting for. Guy Ritchie’s take on Arthurian legend might just be the version you’ve been looking for.
Prior to seeing this 2017 movie, I had no idea who or what a Charlie Hunnam was, and this put him squarely on my radar, alongside cementing the film in my annual re-watch rota. Hunnam radiates King Arthur energy, but lensed through a Guy Ritchie prism. He’s a King Arthur for a different age, a hero rooted in the streets, not just the castles. He’s the king who will fight for orphans with the same strength his legendary counterpart fought for causes. This Arthur is the one you can rely on. The man who will die to save those who work in a brothel, because to do anything else would be a crime against his nature. Hunnam was born to wield Excalibur.
The Guy Ritchie Touch: Tone, Style, and Hunnam
There’s a different legend going around Hollywood. It told of a six-movie plan starting with Legend of the Sword. Warner Bros. believed in a Captain Insano dream where Legend of the Sword effectively served as the pilot for the various offshoots. To strongly torture an analogy, this was the sword in the stone of success. While we’ll come back to this, for now just remember this film was designed to set up King Arthur as a sort of Iron Man in the new shared universe. Separate movies would establish the rest of the Round Table.
All that sounds great, but the cornerstone of getting audiences telling their friends about a movie is not confusing the shit out of them. The trailers for Legend of the Sword might have triggered self-harm warnings at Warner, because it presents as an epic, a movie of fantasy-verged spectacle, and while it is totally that, it’s also a Guy Ritchie movie. That means British Gangsta™ talk instead of the stylised ye olde timey language audiences might expect.
When Uther is heroic when asking his brother to hold the crown, and hold it steady, we know we’re in the right theatre. But if someone vibes on screen later and asks, “All right, guv?” you might think you’ve dropped a tab and walked into your own trip. If you’re primed for it, fine, but the trailers did little to prepare audiences for Ritchie’s signature style.
Me? I was charmed and delighted by the tone. It’s fresh to see the heroes of Arthurian England acting like everyday British instead of royalty, but some people were for sure turned off by the… let’s call it a less formal take. The movie is a clash of tone; the formality of Bedevire, Vortigern, and Uther is starkly contrasted with the gangster vibe of Arthur, Wet Stick, Percival, and Back Lack. But it’s precisely this tone that gives Legend of the Sword such unique energy.
For example, there’s a wonderful backstory sequence where Arthur and the lads are recounting the events of the day to Michael McElhatton’s Jack’s Eye. This is a montage back and forth of plain talk, gutter talk, and high-brow talk that tells a story of how Arthur’s suddenly become noticed by the wrong people. Or… there’s another scene where Arthur’s crew are extorting Mike for… let’s call them tariffs. The back and forth between the gang is almost a polished pattersong.
If you’re in the mood to be Guy Ritchie’d—maybe you’ve come off another Charlie Hunnam crossover, like The Gentlemen movie—and want to see his take on Arthurian legend, this is the movie that delivers. And Hunnam’s the perfect vessel for this vision. Imagine this scene: he must agree to be sacrificed, because it will save those dearest to him. Arthur goes… well, perhaps not willingly to slaughter, but he’s content that his life is worth less than all those who would die should he not bend the knee. It’s humbling, but in his humility he understands this is one moment for him that buys everyone he loves a future. Ritchie’s touch portrays the people who needed saving not as ‘the kingdom’ or ‘the nobles’, but rather prostitutes. The ordinary. The overlooked and the downtrodden. It’s still heroism, but it’s a smaller form of it, for all the sacrificial price is the same.
Ritchie excels at telling stories about people we might actually meet, as opposed to heroes with capes.
Visual Spectacle & Lore Reimagined
The production values in Legend of the Sword are outstanding. This is a lavishly produced movie, where no expense was spared—be it on the sound or visual stages. The 2017 special effects still stand up today. The set pieces ooze charm or villainy depending on whether they’re castle throne rooms or vile grottoes, and the nasty monster Syren is, indeed, fucking nasty.
However, spectacle alone can’t carry a movie; this is a thing the MCU is learning as audiences bore of sparkle when substituted for storytelling. It’s good it’s Guy Ritchie at the control panel here, because he’s a maestro of using effects as a storytelling mechanism.
There is a sequence when The Mage gets a snake to bite the would-be king. Arthur goes on a venom-fuelled high, and during his ride to the castle, he sees the dryads that live in trees with the same clarity that he sees the evil that burns in the hearts of men. The special effects are sublime, sure, but there is a subtle undertone here where Ritchie’s direction uses this bombast to show that the Blacklegs are evil wankers and not to be trusted—but we see it through Arthur’s eyes. Lesser directors would install a character to exposition this to us.
However, Ritchie’s brilliance is also a pitfall. The movie was confusing for people used to a more traditional Arthurian take. Lorraine Bruce as Syren, with Eline Powell and Hermione Corfield as backing Syrens, didn’t appear in the traditional legend. Neither, I believe, did the axe-wielding creature that Vortigern becomes. Legend of the Sword plays fast and loose with the familiar tale, instead giving us the what-if version where Arthur was raised in a brothel and ran a street gang. This is absolutely going to knock people right off their perch if they don’t know what they’re in for.
For all that Ritchie’s deviation from established canon can be a misstep, there are moments of brilliance in it too. The thing I really liked was how Merlin was effectively deleted. We’ve got the sword he handed to Uther—the very sword that goes into the stone and eventually becomes Arthur’s—but for all intents and purposes, this film’s version of Merlin has been Raptured away. While he’s a figure of import in the legends, Ritchie’s choice here makes Legend of the Sworda fundamentally more grounded movie, where wizards can’t cruise in and save the day. The Mage in this movie is clearly young, an apprentice in an order on the run, so she can’t magic the pain away either. Ritchie’s take swaps Merlin, a legendary miracle-worker, for a more plausible story where the strength found in the hearts of men gets to shine brighter than magic.
Character & Thematic Depth – Heroism, Humour, and Flaws
This gives us a better lens of heroism to appreciate Hunnam’s Arthur. Sure, he’s an action hero, but he wrestles with destiny as much as the sword. That’s the premise of the movie—the idea that a man, backed by his posse, can achieve great things if fate puts its finger on the scale.
While Hunnam owns the mantle of a leader of the down-and-out, a true Born King of the people, it wouldn’t be as special a movie without the side characters. Ritchie didn’t skimp on his homework; he understood the part of the assignment where the Knights belong to a Round Table. It’s a team effort, and this is shown to great effect in moments like the powerful subplot between Bleu Landau’s Blue, Neil Maskell’s Back Lack, and Jude Law’s Vortigern. Through the lens of spoiler-free reviews, we can talk about how a father, a son, and a tyrant king wrestle with words in a seedy tavern while the city burns. There is such strength in Landau’s performance, in his anxiousness to be strong while his father faces certain death, because to be weak would be to invite that fate all the faster. The movie celebrates all the cast’s heroism in similar ways—whether it’s The Mage coming to a land where she’s hunted, or Bedevire’s becoming a blacksmith to hide in plain sight. It’s a subtle layer to the entire film that ensures no small parts. Every screen minute is well spent.
And the film is funny. Like, laugh-out-loud moments—for instance, when Arthur is sent by The Mage and Bedevire to the lost lands. We get Ritchie’s signature voiceover technique to show contrasting perspectives—which brings us closer to the people experiencing the trauma.
Humour isn’t limited to the heroes, also giving the villains a little humanity. There is a moment where Arthur makes an escape from the long arm of the law by diving off a cliff and into a river. It’s a long way down! Suicide, surely. While the Blacklegs up top are wondering what to do, one of them nudges the shoulder of another to ’fake out’ push him over. It’s such a quintessentially Commonwealth form of hazing, beautifully done and with Ritchie’s show-not-tell style.
Still, for all of Ritchie’s success with male characters, Legend of the Sword lacks strong women—much like his other films. There is The Mage—who is awesome—but as a director he can’t help but require her being saved at one point. Maggie is a cool character, but easily disarmed by Vortigern. The prostitutes at the brothel are powerful in their own way, but used primarily as a vehicle to show Arthur’s heroism and his focus on standing up for people regardless of their station, not as people with agency in their own right. Catia (Vortigern’s daughter) is a paper-thin character, as is Igraine (Uther’s wife and Arthur’s mother). Ritchie’s big blind spot is that he normally makes a boy’s own adventure, with one signature strong female lead. It’s Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s The Mage in Legend of the Sword, just as it was Aubrey Plaza’s Sarah in Operation Fortune or Kaya Scodelario’s Susie Glass in The Gentlemen TV series. This lack of strong women is such a missed opportunity in Legend of the Sword; since Ritchie edited the Arthurian legend wholesale, what was to stop one of the Knights of the Round Table being female? Why did The Mage need saving? Could Aidan Gillen’s Bill have been a female archer? This isn’t meant to take away from Gillen’s performance, which was funny and powerful in equal measure, but imagine for a moment if the boy’s own adventure had a woman or two along for the journey, rather than relegated to set dressing or people to be saved.
For all that, Legend of the Sword has serious class. The fight scenes are epic. The magic is baller. There is mysticism and heroism at every turn, but also great concepts like friendship being important—especially the kind of longer-term friendship that you can build a kingdom on.
It’s good with the character arc for Arthur, too. It would be insufficient if he remained a gangster on the throne. We’d love him to remember the life lessons he learned along the way, but to be a good king, you need to be something more. There is a powerful moment where The Mage is providing some mentoring advice to Arthur. She asks him if he saw everything he needed to see when he had a vision. Of course he didn’t—her point is that he looked away. She tells him that everyone—even her—would look away, but that’s the difference between a man and a king. A king can’t look away. It’s a fairly brutal and thematically important moment where she’s giving him the true talk—hiding his skills and pretending to be a dropout won’t cut it. To be king, he must be kingly, which is different from Vortigern’s tyranny, or Arthur’s existing… let’s call it ‘leadership style’.
The Box Office Bomb & Legacy
I promised we’d go over the Hollywood legend, that mystic tale of a six-movie shared universe built off the back of royalty-free legends. You might be thinking, if this movie is so good, why haven’t I seen it? Why didn’t it get sequels? Well, you’ve hit on one of Hollywood’s most spectacular franchise faceplants. Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword was supposed to set up a legion of sequels and spinoffs in the same universe, but the plan failed at the first hurdle.
As I mentioned before, the crucial part of any long-term movie series is ticket sales. Sure, critical reception is important, but only as a driver to box office success. Sequels don’t get made on the hope that cult status will arrive overnight; it’s why it took us so long to get a sequel to The Accountant.
See, the ambition Warner displayed is a clear indication their exec suite were collectively off their meds. They believed that the six-movie plan, with Legend of the Sword effectively serving as the pilot for the various offshoots, was the key to success. They were basically trying to create their own Avengers-style universe but with Knights of the Round Table. The first movie would establish King Arthur—remember, he’s Iron Man here—and separate movies would give us the other major characters like Lancelot. It led to this 2017 film feeling slightly… incomplete. Much of the work that Legend of the Sword did in setting up spinoffs led to an absence of major characters—like Lancelot and Guinevere. They deliberately left out those big names so they could have their own solo films later, but it all burned up on re-entry. King Arthur grossed $148.7 million worldwide against a budget of $175 million, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs of the decade. The film opened to just $15.4 million in its first weekend, a truly brutal start for what was meant to be a franchise-starter.
It’s possible—even likely—that the catastrophic failure of Legend of the Sword to find its audience was in a combination of being fast and loose with the lore, missing characters, and the slightly misplaced tone. Any one of these you could overlook, but three in a row—especially when none of this was made clear in the trailers—meant that moviegoers who weren’t me didn’t jive with the film.
It was a clear victim of mismarketing (leading to audience dissonance) coupled with, dare I say, Ritchie’s hubris. He promised the world, and while the movie is excellent, it’s not the movie that was marketed. It doesn’t fit cleanly into a genre niche, and that’s fine for a film with a smaller budget, but something on this scale needs to have broad market appeal to greenlight sequels. As far as the film itself? It’s a great movie and stands alone without the next promised films. It serves as an interesting post-mortem on a hard marketing failure, almost like the Arthurian version of Firefly. If Fox hadn’t bungled the marketing of Whedon’s cult classic, could we have had more than a single season of an excellent show? The same thing holds true here: we’ve got a great movie, but with a lower budget, better marketing, or better expectations management, we might have had more. In the end, we’re left to wonder what might have been instead. The film had some genuinely interesting ideas buried beneath all the studio meddling and reshoots.
But Warner Bros.’ grand plan for an Arthurian cinematic universe died faster than you could say ’Excalibur.’
Drawing Sword from Stone
Is Legend of the Sword a perfect movie? Hell, no. It has its flaws, particularly in its handling of female characters. But is it a bad movie? Absolutely not. It’s a unique, stylish, and incredibly entertaining take on a classic legend, filtered through the unmistakable lens of Guy Ritchie. If you’re willing to set aside your preconceptions of King Arthur and embrace a gritty, often humorous, street-level epic, then I highly recommend giving this film a watch.
Fans of Ritchie, particularly his work on things like The Gentlemen or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., will love Legend of the Sword. Story lovers who are tired of the eternal nonsense love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere will be delighted that this movie tosses all that in a woodchipper. And those who wondered why Merlin didn’t just save everyone will love the mages-are-hunted take.
Let me know in the comments below if you’ve seen Legend of the Sword and what you thought. Did you love the Ritchie take, or were you hoping for something more traditional? If you were delighted to see David Beckham embrace thug life, click Like. And if you’re just the person who loves dredging up the maybes of yesteryear…
Ooooooh, I didn't realise this version was Guy Ritchie. He's actually my favourite director.... I love all of his stuff. I'm currently immersed in watching MobLand - another of his, and thoroughly enjoying it. I'll add this one to my list!
I have to agree with you in this one....
This movie is also my favourite if all the king Arthur movies I've seen 😁
And I've re-watched it too many times to count 😅