Anarchy

Michael Almereyda once again stuffs a Shakespearean play into modern day society and comes up with an incomprehensible mess. His film of "Hamlet" at least used as its framework an enduring masterpiece with themes as relevant to today's world as when it was written. But "Cymbeline" is an obscure, rarely produced oddity from Shakespeare's canon which employs unlikely plotting centered on obsolete sexual morality which has no relevance to today's world. Why Almereyda thought this archaic chestnut needed to be set in the present day is baffling.

It is up to the actors to inject some life into this dull mess and for the most part, they are not up to the task. Dakota Johnson is stunning to look at as the ill-used Imogen, but gives a one-note performance that is insufferable to watch. Ethan Hawke brings to the evil Iachimo the same dull monotone that he employed as Almereyda's Hamlet. And Penn Badgley makes the gullible Posthumus seem like a refugee from a boy band. Only Delroy Lindo and Ed Harris project the charisma necessary to make their characters interesting, although demoting Harris' Cymbeline from the King of Britain in the original text to the head of a motorcycle gang is unimaginably reductive.

Almereyda seems to have a fetish for updating Shakespearean drama into the modern world and has no issue with pummeling it into a different shape to fit his concept no matter what the Bard's original intention was while writing it. The approach worked intermittently with "Hamlet" but fails completely with "Cymbeline." Almereyda would be well advised to seek out contemporary stories to make films of and leave Shakespeare alone.

"I live in fear, though this Heavenly angel, Hell is here." Cymbeline (Harris) is the leader of a biker gang and the ruler of his family. His daughter Imogen (Johnson) is sought after and is loved by her family. When rivals attempt to seduce and steal Imogen away from her family and the one she loves things take a tragic turn. This leads Cymbeline on a quest for revenge. Going in I didn't realize this was a Shakespeare play. When I found that out I was nervous. I am not a big fan at all. I did like the Romeo & Juliet with DiCaprio and Coriolanus with Ralph Fiennes but other than that I have not really enjoyed the recent adaptations. This falls under that category. It could be because I'm not a fan and the whole movie is done in the old English but I found it very confusing to determine what was going on. Fans of Shakespeare will most likely not have this problem but as for me I was just too confused and uninterested to really pay attention to and get involved with. Overall, Shakespeare fans will get into this, I just could not. I give it a C+.

This movie is a big disappointment, not because it didn't meet my expectations, but because I couldn't even watch it.

Ed Harris is one of my favorite actors, and the description of the movie on the DVD box sounded pretty good. It didn't say though that "a modern retelling of Shakespeare's timeless tragedy" meant that the dialog would be Shakespeare's original Early Modern English used in a modern setting.

Of course not. Otherwise, who in their right mind would want to watch it? What were the people who made this movie thinking? I still respect the actors who appeared in this feature. I'll call it temporary insanity.

When I first heard the Early Modern English, I thought "this has got to be for effect at the start of the movie – surely it will switch over to regular dialog any moment." When it didn't, I jumped to the next chapter, and the next chapter, and the next chapter …

You have got to be kidding me! It seems many viewers feel the same based on the low user rating.

I'm so grateful that I didn't go to see this movie in a theater. If I had, I might have been compelled to stick it out. Come to think of it, it would have been the ultimate experience for a first date. You would probably get married and have something to laugh about for the rest of your lives together! I'm not going to rate or comment further on a movie I didn't watch. By the way, I almost never bail on a movie – about one in every 500 or so.

I could not endure to watch it. Maybe thou can.

Playing Shakespeare with various NY accents is like playing Moliere with "Allo Allo" accents. It's just crap. The original Shakespeare, performed at the Globe in London, is a lot like Irish English. It is nothing like the squawky dialects of the colonies. Words like "Thou took'st a beggar; wouldst have made my throne a seat for baseness" sound credible in either the original Early Modern English or in standard Oxford English but in Bronxese, Jerseyese, or Manhattenese they sound simply like ludicrous crap.

If that weren't enough the whole production with its pretentious, foreboding, ponderous atmosphere utterly lacks continuity and energy. It's just a sequence of meaningless lines uttered in incongruous settings by talented people whose desperate attempts to breathe life into this corpse of a movie are more cringeworthy than praiseworthy. Talent ceases to be talent when expended so pointlessly.

"On her left breast, a mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops I' the bottom of a cowslip."

It's been over 14 years since Director Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke collaborated together in the modern day adaptation of William Shakespeare's classical play, Hamlet. The film was warmly received by critics despite not being the first time that a Shakespeare play was adapted to modern times without changing the original dialogue (Baz Luhrmann did the same with Romeo + Juliet in 1996). Once again Almereyda decides to leave the dialogue untouched and change the setting to modern times for the adaptation of Cymbeline. The King (Ed Harris) of a biker gangster group known as Britain is upset that his daughter, Imogen (Dakota Johnson) has fallen in love with his protégé, Posthumous (Penn Badgley), who she secretly married. The two have sworn eternal love to each other, but the King's second wife, the Queen (Milla Jovovich), has other plans for Imogen. She wants her to marry his son, Cloten (Anton Yeltsin) so they banish Posthumous from their group. Meanwhile the bikers have decided to stop paying tribute to the Roman Police Department and a war is about to breakout between the two groups. Posthumous has fled to his friend's house where he ends up meeting Iachimo (Ethan Hawke) and tells him all about his lover's chastity. Iachimo makes a bet with him claiming that he can seduce her and prove that she's not as pure as he believes her to be. He meets Imogen and is unsuccessful in his approach, but Iachimo fools Posthumous into thinking he did sleep with his lover and that is where the plot begins to take several unexpected twists.

If the short synopsis of this film felt a bit convoluted, it's because the film actually has a lot going on in the opening minutes where it's trying to introduce the main characters in a very rushed way. The dialogue doesn't help either if you're not familiar with Shakespeare's play because the delivery is extremely fast and new characters keep on coming from all over the place. It's strange that I'm complaining about how fast everything comes at you, because the pacing does get quite tedious and I was thankful the film only runs a bit past the 95 minute mark. But that doesn't mean that the adaptation isn't a mess because it's all over the place. One of the reasons why this adaptation didn't work for me is that the tragicomedy plays out as pure tragedy here and the comedy element is missing from the film. There was no time to get to know any of the characters or their true intentions and it seemed the entire purpose of this film was being able to adapt the play in a modern setting without touching the dialogue. Something that Whedon accomplished much better in Much Ado About Nothing because he focused on the comedy more than on the action. It's funny that I say this because I wasn't even a fan of Whedon's adaptation although I recognized its artistic value, but here there's nothing that worked for me.

Shakespeare's plays might be timeless, but that doesn't mean that all of them can be adapted to film. Cymbeline seems to be one of those plays that don't translate well to the big screen due to the convoluted plot. The performances in this film aren't bad, and I like most of the actors here, but the problem for me was that the adaptation didn't work at all. Not even John Leguizamo can redeem the film despite how well he's played Shakespearean characters in the past (Romeo + Juliet). Ed Harris and Ethan Hawke are both extremely talented actors, but there was nothing they could do to engage me with the film. I love Shakespeare's plays and despite never having read this one, I still could see some of his trademarks in the characters and writing, but unfortunately I didn't care for them in this adaptation.

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