Prince Valiant (1997)

This movie was an unfortunate waste of time, money and talent. It has all the ingredients for great entertainment. A clear hero, beautiful princess, chivalry, castles etc.. The props and costumes department obviously put a lot of effort in the movie and it looks great.Unfortunately this movie is hobbled by a brain-dead script. The story-line is non-sensical. The dialogue is really bad and the acting shows it. There are lines that just cannot be delivered with a straight face and some of the dialogue and plot-twists are just corny.Watching this movie was an agonizing experience, not to be repeated.*** spoilers start here **** Why did the writers have to combine Excalibur with Nordic elements, add Chinese fireworks and a middle-eastern harem? It just doesn't make sense. If the writers had stayed true to the real Prince Valliant stories in the comics, they would have created a much better story line without having to mutilate a variety of the popular legends out there.

After seeing the somewhat visually overwhelming Lord of the Rings trilogy, this was a pretty decent fantasy film to watch. Whilst most of the characters were pretty generic, some were good to watch, especially Prince Valiant. The violence was pretty tame, although this is not really a problem, as most of it looks realistic for the times that the story is set in, as does the armour and weapons, aside from maybe Excalibur. The special effects are slightly cheesy, but all the same they didn't really damage the story. You could kind of tell what the ending was going to be, but the story flowed well. Overall, a good movie to watch.

Beautiful sets, great costumes and makeup.Run of the mill script. Mediocre acting.Bad special effects and stunts,and bad film-editing.The special effects were truly terrible. Just stop-the-movie awful. Alligators that don't move and clearly are not alive. One alligator, clad in plate mail (huh?), shoots vertically out of the water into the air and descends down onto the stonework beside the water, where it doesn't move -while characters run about, pretending to be fearful of the clearly-lifeless, unmoving armor-clad alligator. And lots of characters swinging Tarzan-like on ropes, slamming feet first into the villains. Except the actors are clearly hanging on ropes being moved by an overhead crane. And the ropes move slowly, as if there was great concern on the set about hurting the actors. In these scenes the villain conveniently stands in one spot until the slow-swinging good guy finally collides with him. This isn't a one-time screw-up; the slow-swinging Tarzan-bit happens over and over again.The film editing is bad enough that it makes it hard to follow the story at spots. And the stunts and special effects kept blowing up the suspension of disbelief.There is plenty of no-brainer action, though, and high production values on the sets and costumes. This could have been fun if it was better made.

Hal Foster told us his own version of the King Arthur Saga with the 'Prince Valiant' Comic Strips. 'Prince Valiant' was Foster's invention and he created more than 1700 pages of adventure, romance, treachery, sinister villains, cunning heros ... you name it. One could make a great movie by putting any 50 pages of it to celluloid. Alas, in this movie they did not even try to do this. They just ripped off some characters name, gave them complete new personalities, messed up a simple story and build it around some special effects (which are indeed quite nice, but not enough to justify the entrance fee). If you like fast food movies, you might enjoy it, if you like the comic strips, you'll hate it. I recommend Prince Valiant (1954) which is not a perfect movie, but far more authentic compared to the original source. Which is what one should expect when viewing a movie named 'Prince Valiant'.