Heavy sigh.

Yes, it was with the heaviest of sighs that I was stuck watching “Richard III.” There were three reasons for this. Reason 1: It’s f*cking Shakespeare. Reason 2: It’s f*cking 2 hours and 39 minutes long. Reason 3: It stars f*cking Laurence Olivier. Great. Woo hoo! Can’t f*cking wait!

Okay, enough with the * – let’s get down to the review. I’m not really one to get into Iambic Pentameter so within 5 minutes I had turned on the subtitles hoping that would help…it didn’t. Here’s what I glean: Richard is a cripple. Made fun of by his peers but due to his lineage to nobility he holds a high position in the court of so-and-so. To get back at all his “haters” he starts pulling strings behind the scenes to get people to do what he wants. He kills a few here and there and, eventually, makes it to the crown where he abuses his power, murders a few more people and dies horseless on the battle field. Yay!

As I watched the film (and tried to make sense of it) I couldn’t help thinking that this was the story of Dick Cheney in the Bush white house. It MUST be one of his favorite movies. I could even see a resemblance between Larry O. and Big Dick Cheney. Once I put it in that sort of context – I began to enjoy the film a bit more (though I still didn’t understand a whit of what was going on).

As the two hours stretched into what seemed like a fortnight the film FINALLY opened up to a battle scene. At this point I found the film enjoyable only for how terribly directed the battle scenes were. It was as if Larry said: “Okay, group one, go and interact with each other. Now group two. Go group three.” Imagine if you will a few hundred costumed extras walking up to each other to exchange potato salad recipes (Note I wrote this BEFORE Jason’s Potato Salad reference above – make of that what you will) and you have the amount of excitement in the battle scenes. To call them boring would be an insult to the word boring. The ONLY bit of excitement was found in one moment where the camera (assume strapped to a car) was driven while following Richard’s horse. That was cool. But that was it.

The acting was passable in the “we’re kind of on stage but we’re actually on film” style of acting – which wasn’t subtle enough for film and just slightly less overacted than on the stage. The feeling was that all the acting was false and the line readings were, basically, line readings. Note: Larry chews the scenery like he’s at a Royal Fork buffet.

And here’s my FINAL complaint about the film. There is absolutely NO CLEAVAGE WHATSOEVER. Not once! That’s my typical male chauvinist saving grace in a film like this. Yes, I admit, it’s a sad statement but, hey, I’m being honest here!

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THE FILM:

The technicolors were nice. The print was pristine.

WHAT I DISLIKED ABOUT THE FILM:

Everything else.

BOTTOM LINE:

Don’t waste your f*cking time.