Prince Valiant (PG)

Anthony Hickox directs a visually stunning, but ultimately stilted, Arthurian romantic fairytale based on Harold R Foster's comic strip of the same name. A Danish lord steals King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, and Prince Valiant is dispatched to get it back. This is pretty predictable stuff, with an abundance of battle scenes which, while realistic, lack anything to distinguish Prince Valiant from other pseudo-medieval movies. The cast members (with the exception of Joanna Lumley as a witch who's after Merlin's spells) fail to develop their comic-strip characters with the same success that George Of The Jungle recently enjoyed. Instead, they give lazy, banal, one-dimensional performances, delivering a few obvious giggles but little else. Equally silly is Hickox and Carston Lorenz's script which, despite the occasional funny gag, is stuffed full of weak dialogue and fizzy nonsense, devoid of any real intelligence.

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