Starring Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, and Ioan Gruffudd. Rated 14A.

Ridley Scott's Gladiator was a movie of such immense critical and popular success that it touched off a small boom in quasi-historical battle flicks. The Last Samurai, Troy, and the upcoming Alexander and Hannibal biopics attest to the eternal appeal of dashing swordplay and heroes in sandals.

King Arthur seemed like a project with many intriguing elements. The cast is pretty impressive, with Clive Owen as Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot, Keira Knightley as Guinevere, Ray Winstone as Bors, and Stellan Skarsgí¥rd in a wonderfully underplayed performance as the main baddie.

The script is by David Franzoni, who wrote an arguably better draft of the Gladiator script than cowriter John Logan, who took the bows but then went on to the stilted Last Samurai and downright daft Star Trek: Nemesis.

Franzoni's take is that Arthur and his Round Table posse were the remnants of a Roman garrison in Britain. (This would put the story at about AD 450 or so.) On the eve of their withdrawal, the lads are sent on a mission to retrieve the last Romans from their estates. They are obliged to fend off savage Britons (led by a guerrilla leader, Merlin) and emerge from the forest only to meet an army of invading Norsemen. It's last-stand, wallow-in-blood time, with no assistance from sorcerers or magic swords.

To enhance the realism factor, producer Jerry Bruckheimer hired director Antoine Fuqua, of the gritty Training Day and action-packed Tears of the Sun.

Unfortunately, I cannot imagine that Fuqua will be adding King Arthur to his CV. He's certainly ensured that there is little magic in the Arthurian tale, nor wit, life, and colour. Franzoni's perspective is interesting, if overloaded with jarring anti-Christian diatribes, but his dialogue is atrocious. Arthur is a PC bore, much given to making risible pronouncements like: "On this day, if this be our destiny, so be it." Owen is a suitably charismatic actor whose expression of constant torture here might have arisen from Fuqua's apparent requirement to intone every line with the eyes-closed, fists-balled intensity of a bar-band singer.

Given that some people don't listen to lyrics, only the tune, King Arthur might have been fine if Fuqua had given us rousing action sequences. But the fights are framed so closely that the actors are simply blurs struggling in mud. Only the "clang" sound effects let the viewer know what's happening. It's a waste of the actors' preparation, and overall much less exciting than the swordplay at one of those Medieval Faire thingies. I did approve of the fact that a sultry saxophone plays whenever Knightley is on-screen, because in a movie this bad, you'll take any laugh that you can get.