← Back to Reviews
in
#156 - Macbeth
Geoffrey Wright, 2006
In the ganglands of Melbourne, a lieutenant in a prominent crime organisation conspires with his wife to murder the outfit's boss.
I can see the appeal in adapting Shakespeare plays to modern settings while anachronistically retaining the original dialogue, but that appeal is nowhere to be found in Geoffrey Wright's adaptation of the Scottish play. Transplanting the play's action from medieval Scotland to present-day Australia sounds doable in theory, but that theory is shot to hell within a matter of minutes as the film turns out to be a mess of barely-coherent shots and cuts where any attempts at adding grittiness to an already gritty Shakespeare play actively detract from the story rather than enhance it (especially the absurd decision to reimagine the witches as pretty young Goths). Thick Australian accents mangle the words and suck any and all life out of them even as the actors occasionally try something more ambitious than generic tough-guy growling - and that's without mentioning misguided casting decisions such as having Sam Worthington of all people play the eponymous traitor or even local comedian Mick Molloy popping up in one distractingly bad bit part as a murderous henchman. Scenes of garbled Elizabethan wordplay are occasionally interrupted by some especially bland and poorly-crafted action scenes; action scenes always tend to feel a little redundant even in the best Shakespeare films, but this film seems virtually dependent on them to an especially pronounced fault. Combine all that with a garishly over-saturated aesthetic (plus some painfully histrionic background music) and you have what might just be my least favourite Shakespeare film yet. The play itself is defined as a tragedy, but Wright's film definitely comes across as a whole other kind of tragedy.
Geoffrey Wright, 2006
In the ganglands of Melbourne, a lieutenant in a prominent crime organisation conspires with his wife to murder the outfit's boss.
I can see the appeal in adapting Shakespeare plays to modern settings while anachronistically retaining the original dialogue, but that appeal is nowhere to be found in Geoffrey Wright's adaptation of the Scottish play. Transplanting the play's action from medieval Scotland to present-day Australia sounds doable in theory, but that theory is shot to hell within a matter of minutes as the film turns out to be a mess of barely-coherent shots and cuts where any attempts at adding grittiness to an already gritty Shakespeare play actively detract from the story rather than enhance it (especially the absurd decision to reimagine the witches as pretty young Goths). Thick Australian accents mangle the words and suck any and all life out of them even as the actors occasionally try something more ambitious than generic tough-guy growling - and that's without mentioning misguided casting decisions such as having Sam Worthington of all people play the eponymous traitor or even local comedian Mick Molloy popping up in one distractingly bad bit part as a murderous henchman. Scenes of garbled Elizabethan wordplay are occasionally interrupted by some especially bland and poorly-crafted action scenes; action scenes always tend to feel a little redundant even in the best Shakespeare films, but this film seems virtually dependent on them to an especially pronounced fault. Combine all that with a garishly over-saturated aesthetic (plus some painfully histrionic background music) and you have what might just be my least favourite Shakespeare film yet. The play itself is defined as a tragedy, but Wright's film definitely comes across as a whole other kind of tragedy.