The Scottish Play reduced to a garbled Glaurfest

Rating: 3/10 (3 November 2015)

Sadly, this film is a real pig's breakfast - Noggin the Nog meets Once Upon a Time in the West!
The scenery is bleakly magnificent, but Kurzel succeeds in making it look more like a wet weekend in the Greenland of Erik the Red than 11th Century Scotland. Battles take the form of mud-wrestling with daggers in Braveheart warpaint. Michael Fassbender and most of the rest of the cast toy with versions of mumbled Lowland demotic. Sadly, nobody seems to have told Marion Cotillard, who delivers her lines theatrically in mannered Shakespearean English, hurriedly gabbling her way through her first crucial scene as if she were worried about missing her bus. Sean Harris seems to base his performance as Macduff on the insight that his character's name rhymes with gruff.
As a mere thane, Macbeth appears to live in a flimsy shanty town in the middle of a Highland peat bog. After he becomes king, he and his missus are able to move into an elegant castle in the high Norman style. 'More than enough motive for murder there I would have thought.
On the positive side, Lynn Kennedy, Kayla Fallon, Seylan Baxter and Amber Rissmann make a good job of the weird sisters, steering well clear of cackling crone clichés. And David Hayman puts in a good performance as Lennox, a man careful to stay on the right side of power.
But overall, it's a big disappointment. Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa have both made much better jobs of filming the Scottish play.