Sad to say, this is a very bad Hamlet and a very bad film: badly-directed, badly-designed, badly-shot, badly-staged, and worst of all badly-acted. Branagh is a ranting child, Derek Jacobi effete and spinsterish, Horatio a pill, Laertes an unsightly runt, Charlton Heston inappropriately granitic (the First Player is supposed to be an emotive actor, remember?), Polonius neither funny nor formidable, Jack Lemmon an embarrassment, Billy Crystal ditto, Kate Winslet all gush and baby-fat, Julie Christie merely decorative, etc., etc. The obvious under-budgeting doesn't help: the sets are tacky (that graveyard!), the process shots appalling, and much of the action is confined to a Hall of Mirrors, probably the single most inflexible set ever designed for a production of Hamlet. As director, Branagh uses every trick in the book to hold our presumably flagging attentions: pointlessly swirling camera movements, equally pointless flashbacks and insets (Priam and Hecuba?), playing Patrick Doyle's oppressive score almost constantly over the dialogue. As actor, his performance is trivial when it isn't grating. Deficient in physical presence, intellectual heft and emotional complexity, he races through his lines till their sense becomes garbled and sometimes resorts to a screaming mode for which he hasn't the voice. In brief, he plays Hamlet as an ordinary young man who's gotten in a little over his head, which is a poor description of Hamlet but a spot-on description of Branagh.
Review of Hamlet
