YMMV / First Knight

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: After the question of his past, Lancelot suddenly experiences a flashback from his past, which asks many questions, but is no longer commented on in the future.
• Cliché Storm: Not much at the time of the release, but now this film plays for the drama too many cliches of adventure films.
• Harsher in Hindsight: By sheer coincidence, in real life Sean Connery and Ben Cross both died in 2020 with Cross going first, akin to their characters in the movie.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The next Arthurian film to hit cinemas just three years later was Quest for Camelot. It has a similarly very blue color scheme for Arthur and Camelot while going to the opposite extreme with magical and fantastical elements. While First Knight has a stark lack of magic, going for a semblance of realism, Quest for Camelot has stuff like a talking two-headed dragon, a gryphon, a whole magical forest with sentient plants, men transformed into medieval cyborgs through sorcery, Excalibur magically knocking back someone several feet with just a parry... Even granting that one is live action and one is animated, watching the two back to back can feel like one is a bizarro-world version of the other. And on more minor notes, both feature John Gielgud in a minor role, and a James Bond actor as Arthur (in the latter case, Pierce Brosnan).^note Dragonheart came earlier, one year after First Knight, but the Arthurian connection is less direct, mainly through the worldbuilding/backstory. Although it has both Sean Connery and Gielgud too.
  • A later Arthur, Clive Owen, later did a movie called Last Knights, oddly bookending the title of this one - though it's really less of an Arthurian movie than it is a take on The 47 Ronin, Western medieval-style.^note Plus Owen was rumored to be a contender to succeed Brosnan as James Bond.
  • Speaking of Clive Owen, his King Arthur movie also had the baddies using crossbows to devastating effect unlike everyone else, though this time Arthur survives and Lancelot shockingly dies.
  • Ralph Ineson, here playing the chief henchman Ralf, was later promoted to the title character and main antagonist in The Green Knight.
• Narm:
  • Now it can look very cute and naive, when the main characters of the film behave too democratically and liberally, which was fashionable to portray during the release of the film, but it was absolutely impossible in the Middle Ages. (There are academic studies discussing this as an important element in the "Americanization" of the Arthurian legends, as also seen in Disney's The Sword in the Stone.)
  • It is impossible to chuckle when Guinevere exclaims "Camelot", when she first sees the city, once you have watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
  • Even at the time, several critics singled out Malagant's line "Nobody move or Arthur dies!" as laying on the modern touch a bit too much.
• Retroactive Recognition: A young Alexis Denisof, Liam Cunningham, and Highlander actor Valentine Pelka appear as three of Arthur’s knights, and a young Ralph Ineson is Malagant's henchman Ralf.
• Signature Scene: The scene where the mortally wounded Malagant falls on the throne is what many people remember most from this film. This was due to the fact that this moment is often used in culture to depict a pathos chorus in dramatic scenes, or cool finishing off the main villain.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general critical reaction at the time. It suffered from comparisons to another medieval epic which came out in the same year, the much grittier (and no less fantastic) Braveheart.

---