Rent Macbeth (2015)

Bad Scotch Egg - Macbeth review by Count Otto Black

The trouble with adapting Shakespeare for the screen is that nowadays his plays are practically religious texts, and they have to be approached in a suitably reverential manner. Which isn't what he intended at all. If he was alive today, he'd be writing movie scripts, and I don't mean those melancholy little indie pictures about gay coal-miners that win a prize at Sundance but don't exactly set the box office alight, I mean mainstream blockbusters. Hitler. Nixon. Osama Bin Laden. Princess Di. And since he had no problem at all with writing plays about wizards and fairies, Disney would probably have hired him for "The Force Awakens". And what about Dracula or Batman?

These plays were meant to be popular entertainment, not some kind of solemn ritual venerating the sacred words of the Bard of Avon. The standard text of "Macbeth" includes a poorly-written and irrelevant scene modern productions often omit because it's thought to have been added by somebody else to increase the number of crowd-pleasing witches and ghosts; so basically it's the special edition where Greedo shoots first. Unfortunately, what we have here is an excellent cast treating the play so over-reverentially that it's no fun at all, and utterly fails to convey any sense that these are real people living in a made-up world that works on its own terms. In fact, the genuine Scottish Highland scenery makes the characters seem even less realistic.

Inevitably Shakespeare's language is now as archaic as anything else that's 400 years old, yet good actors can deliver it in ways that make it seem natural, even if some of the words sound odd. But in this adaptation, everyone, including the non-speaking extras, acts in an oddly stylized and terribly meaningful way almost all the time. I was reminded of "The Wicker Man", but that in that film, the fact that everyone behaves in such a stilted ritualistic fashion is supposed to stand out as deeply abnormal. Even "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" constantly reminds us that while the knights pursue their pointless quest, ordinary people are getting on with their ordinary (though equally silly) lives in the background. But this version of Scotland seems to be populated entirely by lugubrious chess-pieces.

The self-consciously arty lighting, in-your-face cliché modern camera techniques (lots and lots of slow motion, some of it ultra-slow), and constant droning "Celtic ambient" music don't help either. Kurosawa's "Throne Of Blood" from 1957 remains the best attempt so far to bring this story to the screen, even though technically it's about a Japanese warlord called Washizu and not Macbeth at all (presumably because if your leading man is Toshiru Mifune, it's a tad optimistic to cast him as a Scotsman). Even Roman Polanski's extremely flawed 1971 version is, for all its faults, a lot more fun. This is a film tailor-made for winning prizes at highbrow film festivals, then playing to audiences consisting of three pretentiously arty people who will absolutely love it, and one other guy who thought from the image on the poster that it was "Mad Max: Fury Road" and fell asleep.

Mac the Knife - Macbeth review by MW

Excessively dark and gloomy monotone version of Shakespeare's tragedy with much of the text removed. Michael Fassbender's Macbeth is wooden and lacking in any emotion save a sort of determined killer look. The self-doubt and guilt of Shakespeare's anti-hero seem entirely absent. Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth appears far too subservient and little more than a one-dimensional cipher. The mystery and magic of the three witches is completely thrown away. The Scottish accents of the cast are a refreshing approach to the drama but its poetry is lost in a quagmire of violence and cinematic cliché.

Highly Overrated - Macbeth review by MD

I rented this because I like the play Macbeth and the film had great reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I wish I hadn´t. From beginning to end it is mostly very disappointing, a slow and turgid telling of the tale that is merely pretentious when it thinks it is being clever, and boring when it thinks it is doing something new with an old story. I did not give it one star because there were a couple of neat touches, but overall I would avoid it unless you are a real Shakespeare freak. A perfect example of how wrong film critics can be when reviewing ¨highbrow¨ films.