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Remember the Robert Altman movie The Player? At the end of that movie, they mock the typical Hollywood movie by showing the end of a cheesy movie in which Julia Roberts is sentenced to death in the gas chamber, only to be rescued by Bruce Willis at the very last possible second. Bruce shoots his way into the gas chamber and carries Julia out in his arms. She asks, “What took you so long?” And he tells her, “Traffic was a bitch.” Remember that? Well, First Knight is basically two hours and fifteen minutes of that.

Sean Connery is King Arthur. Richard Gere is Lancelot. Julia Ormond is Guinevere. If you know Arthurian legend, you already know that the King marries Guinevere, but then she and Lancelot fall in love, and this breaks the king’s heart and everybody lives out the rest of their life in great sadness. This movie pushes the love triangle to the final half hour, relying on a series of action set-pieces leading up to it, and then it buys an easy way out by (SPOILERS!) killing off King Arthur just as Lancelot and Guinevere are about to stand trial for treason. So the relationship among the three characters is ignored for most of the movie, then played out very quickly, and resolved conveniently by offing one of the characters.

All the characters feel two dimensional despite the generous run time. Connery is hammy. Gere is hammy. It’s exactly the kind of generic, laughable kind of casting Altman was mocking in The Player. Ormond is capable and does a fine job with both drama and action, but she alone can’t save the movie from being total corn. The costumes and sets look like they should have K-Mart price tags on them and even the great Jerry Goldsmith does the film no favors with an obvious, in-your-face score that brings neither nuance nor depth to any of the proceedings. Goldsmith almost always brings something special to a film, so I half imagine Goldsmith was held at gunpoint and forced to write the score to this clunker against his will.

John Gielgud’s bones are rolled out for a couple of thankless scenes. With Ben Cross and Liam Cunningham. Directed by Jerry Zucker (Ghost, Top Secret!).