FORGET knights in shining armour, quests for holy grails and the gleaming castle of Camelot.

This latest take on the legend of King Arthur turns much of the mythology on its head and gives us a stripped-down story that's barely familiar, but somehow makes sense.

We're in northern England in the Dark Ages, somewhere just south of Hadrian's Wall where the Romans are just about clinging to this outback of their empire.

Artorius (Owen) or Arthur to his mates is boss of these parts, and with his small band of warrior horsemen Lancelot, Bors, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan and Dagonet keeps raiding parties from the north at bay.

These men are brave soldiers, skilled in combat and loyal to their leader. But they are also disillusioned and weary of war.

Arthur's knights were press ganged by the Romans from the conquered land of Samartia (somewhere around Eastern Europe and Russia) and they have been promised freedom to return to their ancestral home after their success in battle in England.

But they have orders to embark on one last mission. Thousands of marauding Saxons have arrived on the coast north of the wall and Arthur and his knights must rescue a Roman family, who face slaughter on the invaders' route south.

The assignment means double treachery for Arthur not only must he face the well organised and bloodthirsty Saxons, but he must also fear a confrontation with their traditional enemy, the native Woad guerilla warriors, led by the holy man Merlin.

It is with the latter, following the rescue of plucky Woad-ette Guinevere (Knightley), that this Dark Ages Magnificent Seven forms an uneasy alliance and prepares for a do or die battle with a new enemy.

Like Robin Hood, Arthur is an English hero who probably did exist but nobody knows exactly when or what he actually did. So over the centuries a highly romanticised legend involving magical swords, wizards and witches and ladies in lakes was developed. The perception has tended to be of a glossy saga of knights from the Middle Ages.

But some historians say Arthur is more likely to have existed in the period when Roman and Saxon England overlapped, when documentary history of that time is extremely rare. They agree that he was probably of Roman origin, that he was a great leader, but that his activities were probably confined to one particular region of England than of the whole country.

Whatever. It's still a legend and film-makers love to make movies about legends.

They also like to stage spectacular battle scenes, if recent movie history is anything to go by and King Arthur has a couple of corkers, the best and most bloody comes at the film's climax with Arthur's men taking on the Saxons. Earlier we are treated to a wonderfully tense confrontation on a frozen lake Arthur's lot one end, Saxons the other, and a sheet of perilously thin ice in between.

King Arthur works best as a spectacle (the influence of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy is plain to see). The battles are brilliantly realised and director Antoine Fuqua, whose last film was the gritty urban crime drama Training Day, has created an effectively cold, murky, muddy Dark Ages England.

It is things like this that the budget has been spent on, as there are no big names in the cast. But King Arthur benefits from that because stars generally bring baggage with them (Brad Pitt in Troy is an example) and while Clive Owen is not an unknown actor, there is nothing to distract from his performance and he goes about the job with quiet effectiveness. He is good at the physical stuff too and does his chances of being the next James Bond no harm at all.

At times the film may strain under the weight of the script's sense of its own self importance. And Arthur's teeth may seem too dazzlingly white and Guinevere's skin too flawless for a film set in this period.

But King Arthur is a rip-roaring adventure. Forget the history, forget the legend just sit back and enjoy the fun.

OUT! rating: 7 out of 10

Film writer Stephen Webb reviews KING ARTHUR

Starring: Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Ioan Gruffudd, Ray Winstone, Stellan Skarsgard, Stephen Dillane

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Certificate: 12a

Running time: 125 mins

Showing from today at: UGC and Cineworld, Swindon