dMYD DVD
Starring Ian McKellen
Y
Come on, it’s Shakespeare, it’s the best thing ever, so it’ll be done over and over and over and over and again and again and again until the Earth freezes and there’s no power and we make power, us, the straggling, loathsome survivors, we make power, we get a generator so the last of us, the five, all five of us can gather round the planet’s last shreds of electricity, and we put on Hamlet because it’s brilliant and it tells us all we need to know about life and it’s what the endless streets of frozen corpses around us would have wanted. It’s Shakespeare.
This is a pretty good one though, because it’s got Ian McKellen and he’s great. The design is amazing as well, using a Third Reich motif and all sorts of decadent ‘30s interiors and clothing to show the wealth and elegance of these backstabbing scumbags and ineffectual victims. McKellen parades through the role as well he should, all sneers, crippled limbs and occasional tusks, though Annette Bening has a good try at stopping his film-grab with a wisely – Americanised turn as the queen who loses everything to a stunted dickbag. Other characters flit in and out, as they do a lot in these things, Robert Downey Jr’s appearance particularly funny because of its brevity and lack of talent. Despite being on the poster it’s clear that he was just sniffing out crack at this point, hired as a pretty face and overactive penis, but it’s nice to see Iron Man crop up and shout pointlessly at Magneto anyway. It’s a film of extremes – though lusciously shot by Richard Loncraine it’s McKellen and the production design that overshadow everything else, despite cannily adapted dialogue rolling around everyone’s mouths like a bag of expressive, expensive marbles, whilst the film comes to a ridiculously overblown climax by blowing up Battersea Power station and having that bloke from The Wire ride around in a jeep over the wreckage. Crucially it makes something that can become rote and boring (oh come on, it’s six thousand years old. Sometimes you just want this) exciting and vibrant, the visuals popping in your face and the whole thing cracking along at a quick pace for something that’s usually staged over a couple of ice ages. Plus, unlike The Deep Blue Sea last week it feels like a genuine film rather than a cut and paste A-Level theatre job, but this is probably because it’s got GUNS AND EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING AND STUFF. Bad man, terrible man, good film.
Oh, and Microsoft spell checks like to correct Annette Bening to Annette Benign. Who sounds like a lovely person.
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