There’s a fine balance between under-acting and over-acting and THE KING doesn’t always manage to strike it. They cram every hot English-speaking character actor in there somewhere, with Joel Edgerton as a tragicomic Falstaff, Ben Mendelsohn a mad king, Sean Harris essentially playing a royal vizier, surely the role he was born for, and Timothee Chalemet is the reliable rock the whole thing is built around. Then there’s Robert Pattinson, usually the best thing in whatever he’s in who for some reason decided to turn up as LeStat doing a Monty Python accent. This is rough and brutal and dirty as all medieval epics should be, with the Battle of Agincourt turning into horror movie-meets-lethal-mud-wrestling-contest. Early on it also feels strangely 1990s, struggling to pick a tone for the portion of the film before Hal is crowned, but once it hits its stride, it really hits its stride. SSP