The Kid Who Would Be King

Cert: PG; Now showing

The legend of King Arthur gets a new, suburban, child-centred outing this midterm break. A simple, pleasant, live-action film aimed mostly at tweens, it works well enough but is unlikely to become a kid movie classic.

Twelve-year-old Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) lives with his mother (Denise Gough) and in defending his best friend Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) from school bullies Kaye (Rhianna Dorris) and Lance (Tom Taylor) makes himself their target. This in turn leads him to a sword on a building site, Excalibur.

A strange boy (Angus Imrie) with elaborate tricks and a habit of morphing via a sneeze into either an owl or an old man (Patrick Stewart) proves to be Merlin (who lodges in Boorman Street, a nod to “our” Excalibur) and warns that long dead Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) is coming back to claim the sword and enslave humanity. Cue kids uniting for an adventure. It feels like an old school kids’ adventure film, the characters are a bit bland, there is no great sense of peril and it is a little earnest, but it’s fun and light and not a bad midterm outing.