Braveheart meets Riverdance

Rating: 2/10 (23 April 2007)

With some good old Dickensiana thrown in to heal the wounds.
From the very start, with the appearance of Liam Neeson in yet another benevolent hero role, the tone is set for the cliché overload. Instead of creating a Great Grassroot American Epic by drawing on slightly more expansive sources than his usual local themes, Scorcese falls into all the usual traps of the historical spectacle and swaps the narrative for the choreographed sketches interspersed with inept political commentary. Unfortunately, the ambitious allegory he aims for gets as confusing as his storytelling and the cultural stereotypes abound.
Good points are few and all to do with solid cast, particularly Jim Broadbent and gloriously hammy Day Lewis. David Hemmings is enjoyable in his Darth Vader cameo and a sufficient quota of erotic images are strategically placed to keep the audience from falling asleep in the third act.
However, the overall impression is that this might have worked out better set to Andrew Lloyd Weber score (even though the excessive use of pig carcasses and some of the mise en scene did recall Greenaway - hopefully, Philip Glass will make an opera out of this at some point).