Much of the poetry and emotion has gone from this decaff version of the Henry plays, letting down Timothée Chalamet’s decent lead performanceShakespeare’s Henriad franchise has been rebooted on strangely sentimental lines in this movie from director and co-writer David Michôd, letting down the decent lead performance from Timothée Chalamet as the titular monarch, Henry V.
It isn’t a showreel moment for Robert Pattinson playing the French Dauphin, who reminded me of John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I’m French! Why do you think I have this outrrrrageous accent, you silly king?”This film replaces Shakespeare’s text with more comprehensible dialogue in the Game-of-Thrones-lite style, neuters the story’s famous emotional betrayal and even glibly suggests a throwaway conspiracy-theory explanation for the casus belli between the English and French before Agincourt.
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