Nice effects though.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Kenneth Branagh is attempting yet another Shakespeare play. This time he's adapting it as a 1930 era musical. The King of Navarre and his three companions swear a very public oath to study together and to renounce women for three years. Their honor is immediately put to the test by the arrival of the Princess of France and her three lovely companions. This one stars Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Natascha McElhone, Matthew Lillard, Emily Mortimer among others.I'm fine with a musical. It's not my favorite genre but I won't hold it against this movie. However, everybody is playing it so broad. At times, they act like it's a parody of a 30s musical. It was ridiculously annoying. The second problem I had was the story. Here we have a story about powerful kings and princess. But it takes place in 1930s when royalty have only nominal powers. It makes no sense. Again it's really annoying. The stagecraft is good but there's no way I can recommend this to anybody other than musical lovers.

Kenneth Branagh attempts to turn William Shakspeare's obscure, rarely-produced comedy into a 1930s-era musical, with the result being both bad Shakespeare and bad musical comedy as the actors are rarely adept at one or the other of the two styles and in some cases flounder badly in both. Particularly painful is Nathan Lane, who seems to be under the impression that he is absolutely hysterical as Costard but is badly mistaken, and Alicia Silverstone who handles the Shakespearean language with all the authority of a teenaged Valley Girl who is reading the script aloud in her middle school English class.The musical numbers are staged with the expertise of a high school production of "Dames at Sea," leaving the cast looking awkward and amateurish while singing and dancing, with the lone exception being Adrian Lester who proves himself a splendid song and dance man. The only other saving grace of the film are Natascha McElhone and Emily Mortimer's contribution as eye candy, but they have given far better performances than in this film and you'd be wise to check out some of the other titles in their filmographies and gives this witless mess a pass.

I do get irritated with modern adaptations of Shakespeare when the director can't make his mind up whether to use the original or to update it. If it's using the original words in an updated setting, that's particularly tricky if set in the 20th or 21st century although it can work OK in period styles, eg the Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night set late Victorian very effectively. It could work with the 30's setting if only there had been far less of the song and dance and far more of Shakespeare's text. Unfortunately, it just ends up being a pretty trivial though very pleasant show. Another problem is Branagh himself. I agree he's far too old to play one of the students but more important, he's such an experienced Shakespearean actor that in spite of all his efforts to be just another student, his strength of acting shows all the time. Of course he should have played the King - no problem in having a mature student King surrounded by younger students. Instead we had a pleasant but unimposing actor for the King, thus an unimposing so-called King with no Kingly attributes. The amount of song and dance, which I found tedious in spite of the nice songs and pleasant enough dancing, unfortunately meant the great Shakespearean dialogue had to be cut down drastically. So the whole thing ends up a trivial and mild confection, and I got very bored, including with the comic turns, and was glad when it ended. Branagh has not done Shakespeare justice in this production.Accolades however to Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan, absolutely splendid as the older couple.

When I first heard Kenneth Branagh was going to make this play as a 30s musical, I was thrilled. As strange as it may sound, it's a terrific concept - the idea of Shakespeare's language and bursting into song not being mutually exclusive. And in fact, I was given the soundtrack (with dialog) of this movie before it came out, and it all seemed to work well and sound quite charming. Well, the music works, mostly. But it's about the only thing in the movie that does work.I like Branagh's work in general very much despite its rough edges, but this movie is an inexplicable failure -- not due to the concept or music or even the slightness of the play itself, but wholly due to Branagh's strangely uninspired direction. The indifferent acting from a few of the leads is forgivable; the bad singing even more so; although the bad dancing is sometimes quite hard to forgive. But what really kills this movie is that it seems to totally lack Branagh's usual gusto as a filmmaker. The concept may be audacious, but the staging is completely undercooked. Right from the opening credits, which are just weirdly static -- headshots against red satin?? -- where is the Ken Branagh who gave us those fantastic opening credit sequences from DEAD AGAIN and MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?? (Another early warning signal of this movie's inertness is an early scene where a guy is riding a bicycle so slowly that it's a wonder he doesn't fall over.) The camera work is boring, the atmosphere of the settings extremely artificial and static, giving the whole movie a stilted, deadened air that doesn't remind one of a 30s screwball comedy so much as it reminds one of a... bad movie from any era. None of the actors (Branagh included) seem to know why they're there; nobody seems to be having any FUN (except maybe Adrian Lester). Plus, the movie looks as if it were made on a painfully low budget - it probably had a higher budget than actually seems to appear on the screen. Only rarely do we get the slightest glint of the old Ken Branagh - the beginning of the final musical number is very nice and has real feeling.This is probably the one movie I've seen where, when it was over, I desperately wished for a DO-OVER... although those don't happen in Hollywood and certainly not for quirky little Shakespeare movies. What a lovely and unusual concept for a Shakespeare movie, down the drain because of weirdly bad direction by a guy who, even if he's not Orson Welles, usually has a mastery of the basics. Come back to us, Ken...