Keira Knightley – King Arthur (2004, Touchstone Pictures)
It’s tempting to pick one of the later Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but it’s hard to pin those failures on Knightley. King Arthur wasn’t really her fault either. It was simply a good idea horribly executed. The concept was to take the Arthurian legends and strip them of their typical High Middle Ages trappings and place them in the more likely historical context at the beginning of The Dark Ages, after the Roman Empire lost its foothold on England. It’s an approach that could work, but in this case mostly didn’t due to silly costumes, bad writing and a questionable grasp of history.
