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This is a fantastic play, and trying to put this on the screen is a commendable effort, but it cannot be denied that this film is a complete mess. The modern setting is completely incongruent with the moral systems inherent in Shakespeare's play. The delivery is wooden, and several of the lines are bundled or just wrongly pronounced. The editing is vicious (hence the 80 min run-time) and so you lose the comic variety of the original play (Pompey and Lucio are severely sidelined). Simon Phillips, as The Duke, gives by far the best performance, but when disguised as a friar, he seems to be acting like a blind man for no apparent reason and his disguise makes him look like John Lennon. The cinematography is amateurish at best, and the restlessness of the camera gets very irritating very quickly. I really wanted to like this, because it was such an ambitious concept, but for me, it fell totally flat, and seemed ridiculous more often than not.
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