King Arthur Movie Review Director : Antoine Fuqua Starring : Clive Owen, Stephen Dillane, Keira Knightley

A very hearty second act almost rescues King Arthur from becoming a computer-generated war-game, but the third act promptly consigns it to its fate as such.

Perhaps it's some collective zeitgeist impotence but we seem to be turning to the movies to get the Patton-esque upbraiding we think/want/need. Don't have your leaders tell you what's what and how to act like a man; let Russell Crowe do it. Don't get your motives from a slippery political ideology, get it from Brad Pitt. Don't find an outlet from your desire to crush some skulls on the nightly news, here's Clive Owen or Colin Farrell to tell you why you secretly want to.

These rallying cries, wane imitations of the "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V ("We few, we happy few") resurged after Braveheart, where Mel Gibson, covered in woad (the blue paint the Scots used) bellowed about freedom. Now, in Troy, Achilles (Pitt) exhorts his men to take immortality by fighting. And, in Master and Commander Captain Jack Aubrey (Crowe) reminds his men of the hearth and home and transports that on-deck by stating that "This ship is England."

Clive Owen, as Artorius Castus, a valiant Roman soldier, hollers about freedom (and one's place in history) too, just as ineffectively (Owen lacks that Crowe-bravura but they're not really trying for that either). The year is 300 A.D. and the Roman Army has started to retract from its outposts and former strongholds, including England. The power vacuum proves an open invitation to the vicious Saxons to the north. They sweep down, pillaging and pludering (I couldn't help but hear Harvey Coreman and Slim Pickens do the "Old Number 6" riff from Blazing Saddles in my head as the Saxons were on the move: Hedley Lamarr: "Number 6"? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one... Taggart: "That's where we go a-ridin' into town, a whampin' and whompin' every livin' thing that moves within an inch of its life. Except the women folks, of course. Hedley Lamarr: You spare the women? Taggart: NAW. We rape the shit out of them at the Number 6 Dance later on." Instead of Hedley Lamarr the Saxons are led by Cedric (the malevolent Stellan Skarsgaard)).

Possibly as dangerous is the mystical leader Merlin, whose constituency appears to be mud people living just across Hadrian's Wall (the northern border of England created by the Romans). They loathe the Romans but they're no great fans of the Saxons and their Old Number 6 routine either. Also on England's pleasant shores are loads of indigenous people who spent two hundred years of fealty under Roman rule, left to fend for themselves.What they need is leader to unite them and this is where Artorius reluctantly steps in.

When he does step in the movie begins to carve out a small and respectable, if not spectacular, niche for itself. Arthur and his knights, including the sallow Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) and the boisterous Bors (Ray Winstone), are supposed to be freed when they discover they have to perform one more dangerous task for Rome. They are to escort an important, stranded Roman family from across the Wall and back to ships bound for the Mediterranean. Venturing back into enemy territory the Knights of the Round Table (yes, there is one) discover a Roman torture chamber full of "pagans" director Antoine Fuqua seizes the chance to make the disparate parts of geography, history, sociology and politics gel.

Fuqua and his editors (Conrad Buff and Jamie Pearson) bring an undeniable vitality to the second act as Arthur attempts to bring the family, and the peasants who fear slaughter, back to their stronghold (it's never called "Camelot").

Sadly, once this mission nears completion it results in just one more lumbering, long CGI battle, prefaced by a riding-in-front-of-the-troops "St. Crispin" speech. When we're not given long shots of snorting Saxons we're in close with hand-to-hand combat as tightly choreographed as a music video, and about as exciting.

The leads are fine, particularly Keira Knightley. She's scary sexy, but will probably be plagued, for the rest of her life, by sado-masochists who'll get into a scene where her broken fingers are set aright (setting her a-moaning), as well as her Road Warrior leather get-up, which looks like she slipped into a huge Roman sandal she found lying around.

When she hollers it's a nasty war cry instead of a trumped-up pep rally for a clash of armaments.