It's almost uniformly great on the technical side and Oldman is fantastic, but its also really dull.

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2018)

Buried beneath a seamless layer of facial prosthetics and a subtle but firm fat-suit, Gary Oldman truly does disappear into the cigar-and-scenery-chewing role as he bellows out famous speeches, mumbles through mildly comic monologues and occasionally over-acts throughout the two-hour melodrama mainly made to win the man the Oscar he so rightly deserves for a diverse career so delightfully delivered. There's very little else to keep you in your seat though, unless you happen to drift off when the picture gets its dullest. Besides the fact that it is genuinely well-made on almost all counts, it is also frightfully drab for most of its run-time and I was honestly quite bored for a large majority. The story seems slightly pointless too because, other than informing us of some homegrown heroics (which are themselves interesting and important) in history-book fashion, the talking-heads just go back-and-forth about things that even the least historically knowledgeable audience members should already know the ending to. There's not much character growth during it either, making it seem more like something that everyone should know but not necessarily sit through as a cinematic experience. 5/10