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"The Romans have broken their word. We have the word of Arthur. That is enough. I will prepare."

For better or for worse, King Arthur is the direct opposite of what I expected. From a Jerry Bruckheimer summer movie, one anticipates something with action as its bread and butter, a line of spectacular set pieces that string together a flimsy narrative and a dozen hammy performances. Instead, we get something that simply does not work as an action movie, suddenly becoming tedious whenever its characters bust out their swords. Beyond the incomprehensible fights and battles, though, one might find a thoughtful deglamorization of the Arthur legend; a gritty, tough movie that shows a surprising willingness to traffic in ideas. Said ideas are fairly rudimentary, granted, but they're dealt with in occasionally rich and subtle ways, full of implications and intriguing tangential themes. For some reason, this is a thoroughly interesting movie; it just doesn't do what it was supposed to in the first place.

The unfortunate fact is that King Arthur is the first major motion picture to be edited entirely by baboons. This is a mild surprise, since the credits list Conrad Buff, one of the most respected professionals in the industry, as one of the film's two editors. Clearly, though, Buff fell ill early in post-production and was quickly replaced by a pugnacious monkey who started pressing buttons with the kind of glee only a simian can muster. This is the only possible explanation for the incoherent barrage of imagery that assaults us every time the characters start moving.

Director Antoine Fuqua undoubtedly wants to create a degree of confusion and disorientation in the battle scenes -- it's been done before. He shoots extreme close-ups that are then incorporated into quick-cut montages of flying fists, swords and bodies. What he and his editors don't do is create a sense of place and action, an idea of what's going on at any given moment, and the images remain rapid-fire disconnected shots. It gets worse when the film attempts to cut between simultaneous action, at which point it loses all semblance of visual unity.

But between Fuqua and Bruckheimer's incompetent action stylings is a strong script by David Franzoni (Gladiator), one that could have made for one of the best films of the year had it been better realized. Even so, it's a skillful interpretation of the legend and a neat view of knighthood's darker side, even if its claims of historical accuracy are disingenuous at best. It seems like it could have been real, though; Arthur and his knights come off as human, flawed, real, and genuinely likable in the way one-dimensional heroes can never be.

Clive Owen gives a magnetic performance as the titular monarch-to-be, portraying a complicated man whose duties to his homeland, to the country he serves, and to the men he serves with conflict with each other as well as with his faith. I loved the way the screenplay used these clashes to probe not only the character's inner dilemma -- what exactly has he spent his entire life fighting for, and why? -- but also to delve into more general thematic exploration: the meaning of freedom is consistently questioned, and the definition the film finally comes up with is vague but heartbreaking in its own way.

The film's hook -- that the Knights are conscripted Sarmatian soldiers forced to serve Rome for fifteen years and eager to return home -- is cathartic, and helps make the knights into multifaceted characters. Lancelot comes off as stunningly ignoble at first -- "Suicide cannot be chosen for another," he yells when Arthur is forced to send them on one final, particularly dangerous mission -- but the movie doesn't let us off the hook that easily, prodding us to see the man's point instead of simply condemning him.

On the opposite end is Dagonet (Ray Stevenson), whose nobility sure seems to be the stuff of legend but is given a human dimension in his affection for a child he frees from an underground prison. Somewhere in the middle of the moral spectrum lies Bors, played by the ceaselessly tremendous Ray Winstone -- he seems equally willing to abandon his children (who have numbers, not names) and his loyalty to Arthur but cannot seem to actually let go of either.

Aside from the aforementioned doozie of a complaint, there are, alas, other flaws. Keira Knightley plays a warrior Guinevere, who turns out to be an entirely useless character, a desperate effort to insert a female hero into a male-dominated story. Merlin, too, must be pushed to the sidelines of this demystified retelling, and he seems to be nothing more than a possibly insane cultist. On the other hand, Stellan Skarsgard is brilliantly raspy as the fearsome Saxon warlord; the New York Times' A.O. Scott describes him as the Swedish Christopher Walken, and that sounds about right. I love performances like this.

Fuqua may not know how to stage an action scene, but he knows how to put together a movie, and the more placid parts of King Arthur are visually competent and well-constructed. And there is an undeniable accomplishment in the film's ability to present a compelling central idea amid all the sound and fury: the tacked-on final scene notwithstanding, by the end of the film, we feel that Arthur and the Knights are fighting not for a country or a contract, but for each other.