Daniel Craig’s worst Rotten Tomatoes movie is an Arthurian legend with a twist

When you’re trying to make a name for yourself in Hollywood, everyone has to start somewhere. It’s a fact of life for almost every major actor or actress: you have to start small with your roles, like Amy Adams appearing in the beauty pageant satire Drop Dead Gorgeous or Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can years ago she became an A-lister. Probably one of the most famous examples of people who like to run is Michael Shannon playing a young man who loves to fight very briefly at the end of the classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, 15 years before his Oscar nomination ” in Sam Mendes’ film “Revolutionary Road”. But not every actor’s humble beginnings are something they can brag about.

Consider the last person to play 007, Daniel Craig. Craig was a famous British actor before he was asked to play James Bond, but most people in the United States believed that they first saw Craig and his rocky face in another Mendes film, 2002 mafia movie “The Road to Perdition.” These people have probably forgotten (and Craig probably wants to forget) his first foray into American cinema, considering it’s his lowest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes. That ignominious honor belongs to none other than Disney’s 1995 film, A Child in King Arthur’s Court.

As the title suggests, A Child in King Arthur’s Court was inspired by Mark Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and the basic premise is the same: what if someone from the present day were somehow able to travel back in time to mythological Arthur ruled England? It’s an easy fish-out-of-water game with a fun twist on the classic Arthurian legends, and the mid-1990s was prime time for low-budget live-action Disney games with an easy hook and at least one familiar face. In the summer of 1995, when the film was released, that face did not belong to Craig, but to Thomas Ian Nicholas. Nicholas was (at the time) best known as the lead in the underrated, charming baseball comedy Rookie of the Year, and a few years later he would be part of the ensemble cast of the hugely successful American Pie. Nicholas as Kelvin, the eponymous child, looked almost as lost as the character himself in medieval England, but that’s nothing compared to two his co-stars. You see, it didn’t just serve as one of Daniel Craig’s earliest roles; as you can see from the photo above, his co-star in the film was future Oscar winner Kate Winslet.

Craig was still years away from becoming even a moderately famous actor, let alone a global phenomenon in one of the longest-running action franchises. Winslet, on the other hand, starred in Peter Jackson’s disturbing thriller “Celestial Creatures” last year, and just a couple of months after that film’s release, she starred opposite Emma Thompson in the beloved adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.” But in between, Winslet worked along with Craig, with both serving as love interests in a subplot alongside Calvin trying to find his way back to the correct period time.When you think about how wild it is to see not one but two major British film stars at this early stage in their careers, you might wonder why this film hasn’t been released more often. Well, it helps that the film has a whopping 5% (yes, five percent) on Rotten Tomatoes. Even considering the fact that a movie’s rating on this aggregation website doesn’t automatically mean that many critics might like the movie on its own… well, five percent is staggeringly low.

About the only good thing you can really say about reviews for “King Arthur’s Court” are that there aren’t many of them. Even films that are almost 30 years old have received so many reviews that five percent are 22 reviews. However, if you can do your basic math, you know that means there is only one, count them, one positive review of the film by Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times. And while he gave it a 3 out of 5, it’s not exactly a rave. “This animated time travel fantasy is clearly the product of imagination and thought,” notes Thomas, which … well, of course it’s true, but hopefully that’s true of most good movies. Other reviews are rather harsh, with one writer comparing it to “an hour and a half video aquarium for kids” and another saying it’s “stunningly bland, homogenized and devastated by a complete lack of original wit and charm.”

A Child at King Arthur’s Court was also not a massive hit at the box office; even with a reported budget of $15 million, it failed to earn that much even in the United States when it was released in August 1995. For Winslet, the rise in her career would come very quickly, with the aforementioned “Sense and Sensibility” dominating the awards discussion that winter, and “Titanic” a couple of years later. For Craig, things took a little longer on the big screen. Indeed, it was his star turn in the British crime film Layer Cake that demonstrated his ability to be as smooth, suave and sincere as James Bond required. these days, with his version of Bond finally undergroundCraig has pushed himself into franchises as diverse as Benoit Blanc’s films, as well as edgier indie entertainment like this winter’s Queer. But even as he reaches new heights in these signature roles, as well as his work on stage, we should never forget (even if he might want to) that Daniel Craig’s career started out pretty low. The good news is that he had nowhere to go but up.