Almost all reviews here are full of praise and candor worship. Yes, Nigel Hawthorne, Dame Helen Mirrel and great late Ian Holm do amazing jobs, albeit NIgel overdid it a few times, but that alone does not save the movie. What seems to be a problem is a very uneven mixture of very weird very British comedy, dark tragedy, and very sudden, almost jumpy change of light and safe. Rupert Everett is a likable choice for a Prince George, whilst Dame Helen for a Queen. And then - what? Eyes popping in sheer shock and amazement of how much time is spent in the movie talking about such delicate issues as stool. OK< once it may work, twice, it betrays some banality, thrice, it gets really unwanted and low-brow.
Sheer exaggeration of some scenes and very thick strokes of paint on a movie canvass produce a sickly sweet and oftentimes bedazzling effect. The movie suffers from this uneven shaky posture and so fails to deliver either a very satirical comedy, which is not, or a very decent period drama, which is also fails to become.
What is certainly missing here is a willful decision to stick to a certain route, and while the plot swings between laughs and tears, it gets into a very strange broth of no good taste.
This is the main problem, the second being a certain overplay of several sickness scenes. Too blatant, too obvious, too simplistic. It gets the albeit decent drama aside from a painfully earned place to a messy gruel.
Pity, the movie could have been a masterpiece, instead, it became a painful mix of wrong chemicals.
Review of The Madness of King George
