Hogwash in costume

Rating: 2/10 (31 July 2014)

If your looking for a history lesson, you'd do better with Toy Story. This fluff-piece is a joke compared to its predecessor which has as much historical value as a wooden nickel. Apparently, according to this film, Elizabeth Tudor whined and whimpered and yelled all her queenly life in over-lit hallways that suggest that the halogen lamp was invented in the 16th century. Not a shadow to be seen on these movie sets. This time around, Elizabeth mopes and screams and whines like a jilted fifteen year old. Her maid in waiting, Bess Throckmorton, apparently missed all her acting classes because she could do nothing more than stare and vaguely smile. Clive Owen, who shows no more acting ability beyond that of a disembodied foot, looks like a cheap cartoon version of Errol Flynn in tights as he bandies around on ship ropes. He obviously texted in his role, sounding almost as dull and talentless as Liam Neeson doing Shakespeare. Even Bette Davis' version with Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, another fluff piece, had the smarts to portray Elizabeth as a real queen, acerbic, angry, confused, intimidating to her suitors, but ultimately capable of running a powerful country, taking up more space than her underlings. Here, Cate Blanchett, whines and sobs like she had just failed her SATS and does nothing more important than wear clothes. Some scenes are so ridiculous, you'd thing you were watching a back story of the making of Project Runway. Cate Blanchett, in this version, seemed more interested in the buffet for the cast members than acting like she ruled one of the most powerful forces in European history. The only interesting piece centers on the revisionist version of Mary, Queen of Scots. Unfortunately, like half the film, her demise is filmed entirely in slow motion, making her drawn-out execution last longer than her actual life. This film would have cost half the time to watch if they hadn't filmed so much of it in slo-mo. Snore. This is the crib notes to history, lazily made for coasting high-schoolers, most of whom cheat on tests and are no more interested in actual history than the wigs on their head and their designer's dresses. Which brings us to the trumped-up reason for Elizabeth's white makeup and hair pieces. In this film, the writers want to give the impression that Elizabeth's most important decision was to become a born-again virgin. In reality, she suffered from eczema, lice and rickets. Her appearance and hair faux paus were more an excuse to cover up those maladies, not a goth need to look wacky to her subjects. While the previous film suffers from revisionism and loose attention to history books, it has beauty and depth this film lampoons. At worst, the first film avoids looking like it's brightly filmed on the set of "Friends." And, strangely, in a story about an historical figure whose beauty, or loss of it, Cate Blanchett is not only very attractive but the only character that doesn't age. My advice: stop reading magazines about body consciousness, get the heck off your pointless cell phones, stop watching "Stupid Vapid Housewives from Any County, and read a book on this amazing woman in English history. She took up a lot more space than this waste of celluloid implies.