MovieChat Forums > Kenneth Branagh Discussion > Mediocre director; hasn't made a good fi...

Mediocre director; hasn't made a good film since 1996!


And even before that, his only good movies were the Shakespeare ones. Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, In the Bleak Midwinter and Hamlet are all great, but Dead Again is derivative schlock that feels less like a tribute to Hitchcock than a tribute to Brian De Palma (an imitation of an imitation) and Peter's Friends is navel-gazing sentimentality that aims for The Big Chill but feels more like Thirtysomething.

Everything else he's done has been dreadful. Films like Frankenstein, Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It, The Magic Flute and Sleuth range from laughably bad to just downright boring and all have (rightly) flopped, critically and commercially. No surprise that he's now selling-out and directing generic, big-budget franchise instalments like Jack Ryan and Thor. These movies seem so joyless and anonymous that they look like they could have been directed by anyone.

The fact that he's best known as a decent actor has saved him from being better known as the most boring and mediocre director of the last eighteen years.

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If he's apparently 'mediocre' how can he be selling out in the first place? And if making a critically and commercially successful film is 'selling out' then I fail to see how that can possibly be seen as a bad thing.

Never ceases to amaze me how the average internet user is more snobby than some of the biggest actors or directors out there. Very sad.

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You must not have seen Thor.

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Thor was great.

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So you've seen an early screening of Jack Ryan?

My IMDb lists: www.imdb.com/user/ur5570856/lists

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I actually like Frankenstein a lot. It's one of my favorite films.

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Yeah, but he made the last good one 18 years ago. The two he made since, As You Like It and Love's Labour's Lost, are terrible. And c'mon, adapting one of the greatest writers of all time is hardly a challenge. Talk about working with the best tools available. Any hack could do a halfway decent Shakespeare adaptation if they remained faithful to the source.

Anyway, his new movie is the worst kind of generic trash, so I feel justified in this opinion. It's the kind of thing Lee Tamahori might direct. His slide into unremarkable Hollywood journeyman has been devastating.

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