The
Tempest is going to have a cold, bitter December. It's probably
going to tank at the box office and the critics have almost universally panned
it for its lackluster performances and for the fact that Shakespeare's story is
almost completely eclipsed by the terrible special effects and costuming. Let's
be frank: The Tempest isn't a great
film.
The
story concerns three groups of people on an island: two mischievous brothers, a
shipwrecked search party and a vengeful woman in a power struggle with an
embittered slave. "The Tempest" amounts to little more than these three groups
wandering around on the screen. The talent is nicely balanced; each wandering
group has at least one performance worth watching. Russell Brand made me laugh
throughout the film, Helen Mirren knocks it out of the park and Alan Cumming isn't
awful. Unfortunately, each of these groups also has a performance that really
blows: the starry-eyed young lovers are both completely unconvincing, Hounsou
is forgettable and virtually unintelligible (his voice doesn't mix well with
the intrusive score) and I'm still scratching my head wondering what Chris
Cooper was doing in this thing.
The
rumors about the CGI are true as well; they are distractingly awful. Ariel (Ben
Whishaw) spends half of the movie prancing around the screen naked, galloping
from one tree branch to the next, nagging Prospera like a neglected kitten. Your
friends have made drunken YouTube videos with better special effects. Throw in
a couple hell hounds that look like they were ripped off from Ghostbusters and you've got the
ingredients for a pretty solid batch of crap.
The Tempest is so flawed that I have
trouble recommending it to anyone. I don't know who the target audience is, but
the Shakespeare nuts are going to have a field day trashing the film because it
differs from the play so much. And I can't see a lot of other average filmgoers
having a great time here either. At the same time, I walked out of the theatre
with a smile on my face and that certainly says something. The film was so
different from anything I've seen on the screen in a while, that I found it oddly
intriguing, though not entirely entertaining. Mirren is brilliant as always, however, and as a result The Tempest is ultimately a bearable but
very misguided step.
