10 Times Movies Got Weapons Wrong

If you have watched a medieval film, it's pretty much guaranteed you have seen a character wielding a flail. In fact, it's genuinely challenging to think of a movie based in that era that doesn't have a scene of a warrior smashing enemies by spinning this ball-and-chain weapon.

Although it has appeared in movies like Braveheart and Gladiator, the Ridley Scott epic Kingdom of Heaven stands out because of the scene where Orlando Bloom's character battles a knight wielding a three-headed flail. Here's the problem; How could anyone control such a weapon? There's no possible way to know exactly how the three balls are going to move so it feels like the knight would injure himself more than his opponent.

At this point, you will probably assume I'm going to say this isn't how flails were used. But it's stranger than that. Many historians believe the flail never existed!

Despite the fact you can find flails in history museums, many of them have proven to be forgeries while others were designed for decoration, not war. Even if the flail was a genuine medieval weapon, it was used far less often than we originally believed.