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Much Ado About Nothing Customer Reviews (7 - 9 of 48 Reviews)

Fun Shakespeare
This movie is worth the time if you like both the play and Branagh. His interpretations are often a little different then most, but this is more fun then the long drawn out, sometimes painful version of Hamlet. The only thing I found lacking was that it could have used a few more special features, but since this movie was made before the DVD age, I'm impressed it had any. All in all its a good buy.

Pretty funny film adaptation of a wonderfully light play
"Much Ado About Nothing" is an exuberant comedy that has delighted audiences for hundreds of years. This film provides some pretty good acting. And though the acting is uneven, I have seen that on stage at the Royal Shakespeare Theater at Stratford-Upon-Avon. The pace and energy of the film is almost manic and there are many laugh out loud moments. However, I think that Branagh let the adaptation drift a bit too far into being about a film rather than Shakespeare's language, which is what Shakespeare should always be about. Also, did we really need to see so many bare backsides? I know this is a bit of a lusty comedy, but this is really a bit much for a family film as is the scene at the window where Claudio is deceived. Answering that this isn't meant as a children's film is not enough because we all want to teach our children to love Shakespeare, and while we don't want it bowdlerized, we don't need it made so that the visuals distract one from the words.

In any case, there is much to love in the play, Beatrice most of all. Here she is given life by the wonderful Emma Thompson. Benedick is done broadly by Branagh and is quite enjoyable if not everyone's interpretation of Benedick. This movie is full of movie stars as well. Denzel Washington as Don Pedro (always a delight on the screen), Keanu Reeves as Don John (appropriately a man of few words), Michael Keaton as Dogberry (effective at times, but far too broad - the Monty Python horseless horse thing got to be tiresome), Robert Sean Leonard as Claudio, and a quite young Kate Beckinsale as the pure and ideal Hero.

For me, the most enjoyable performance was Richard Briers as Signor Leonato. He seems to have the ability to inhabit the world of the play better than the rest rather. He and Thompson, and a few others, say the words as if they were said by real people rather. Robert Sean Leonard, for example, too often says the lines with a kind of preciousness that distracts from his character. It seems as if he brings almost too much reverence for the words to believe a real person can say them.

In any case, the film is worth seeing because of Thomson's Beatrice and Briers' Leonato. If you want to see a light and frothy Shakespeare and don't mind a few, brief, bare backsides then this should be quite enjoyable. As I said, it made me laugh pretty hard.

Buy it. Watch it. Love it.
Save yourself the trip to the library or rental store...once you watch this elegant, funny, gorgeous, star-filled film, you will want to own it.

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