‘King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” starts out with a special effects-laden opening of war elephants the size of Godzilla, controlled by the sorcerer king Mordred, laying siege on Camelot.

Uther Pendragon (Arthur’s father, played by Eric Bana) charges out to battle with the sword Excalibur, climbs up Mordred’s elephant and beheads the sorcerer in less than five minutes. And there is much rejoicing.

This much-too-quick action sequence is weak, but it’s the best thing in the movie. The director should have been sacked, the writers should have been sacked, the producer should have been sacked — and then, just to be safe, the people responsible for the sacking should have been sacked.

The story goes on to follow the subsequent betrayal by Uther’s brother Vortigan (Jude Law, who is about as interesting as a wet carrot here), who uses black magic to usurp the throne and kill Arthur’s parents — but not before they send the boy off in the tired “lost child in a boat” trope. Of course he’s found and raised by a bunch of courtesans with hearts of gold.

After he grows up, there’s a whole bunch of muckery about prophecy and the sword in the stone, and Vortigan going all King Herod to try to kill the grown-up Arthur (Charlie Hunnam, who’s OK here) before the latter can cycle through every possible cliché of the reluctant hero before he finally decides to avenge his parents.

Watching this movie is as tedious as summarizing it, no thanks to the atrocious storytelling and editing styles that are the trademarks of director Guy Ritchie (“Sherlock Holmes,” “Snatch”). Though some people like his style, he has a tendency to inject the vibe of a British street hoodlum crime story into every movie he does. In this case, it feels so forced that it’s beyond stupid. Ritchie also likes to slow down action and chase scenes and then speed them back up to normal, turning the visuals into a murky swamp of unfinished computer-generated imagery.

Creatively, nothing about the movie makes sense. The legendary wizard Merlin, who has always been integral to the story of Arthur, is barely mentioned. Sirs Lancelot and Galahad are nowhere to be seen, and Sir Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou) is relegated to contributing nothing integral to the film. Apparently an actor playing Percival is there somewhere (according to imdb.com), although I honestly don’t remember who or where he was.

Every side character except for a mage/witch (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) is completely useless here, and even then her importance in the movie weighs about as much as a duck. Everyone else is pretty much are there to urge the reluctant Arthur that he should fight his evil uncle.

There’s a massive plot hole involving a giant snake being summoned out of nowhere to eat a bunch of bad guys, literally half a dozen flashbacks of Arthur’s parents being killed (what is this, medieval Batman?), and a tacked-on sequence of the Lady of the Lake giving Arthur his sword back after he throws it away which is so brief and out of nowhere that you could tell Ritchie absolutely loathed shooting it.

There are characters who show up out of nowhere without explanation, a trippy and fruitless vision quest that has no bearing on anything, an aimless villain, no Knights of the Round Table, no Merlin and a whole lot of bad decisions. There aren’t even any good sword fights or battle sequences because they are so chopped up and the film speed tweaked so much, you can never tell what’s happening. This movie has the worst action scenes I have ever seen in a mainstream movie, and its budget was $175 million.

This movie fails on so many levels it’s almost unbelievable. If the writers and filmmakers couldn’t at least come up with an imaginative or good story, they could have made a fun B movie such as Dwayne Johnson’s 2014 “Hercules,” but even that possibility is squandered.

Don’t bother with this rendition of Camelot. ’Tis a silly place, and not in a good way.

***

“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” is playing at the Riverside Cinemas, 1017 S. Boone St. in Aberdeen.

George Haerle holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing for media and lives in Cosmopolis.