Truly awful!

Rating: 1/10 (1 December 2015)

If you take the Shakespeare out of this mess, you would have an amateurish "sword and sorcery", pot-boiler movie which would (and should!) be laughed at.
Re-insert Shakespeare (who must be disturbing his own bones by turning in his grave in Stratford-upon-Avon)and you have one of the most mangled versions of "The Scottish Play" that has been my misfortune to sit through.
Briefly: scenes chopped, changed but not for the better; significant events simply skimmed over or missed; scenes invented and gratuitously inserted (e.g. the daft opening scene); lines entirely stripped of their power; lines entirely missed out and not for any particularly good reason. There is nothing wrong with interpreting Shakespeare and (say) missing out scenes and lines to give a vision of the meaning of the play as the director sees it - e.g. Olivier missed out nearly 1,000 lines of Henry V in his 1944 film production of Henry V (not a film that I personally care that much for but it was effective and did not do a violence to the play). However Justin Kurzel's effort strikes me as the production of someone who simply did not understand his material.
The casting was frequently dire, Marion Cottilard was simply miscast as Lady Macbeth she may be many things but this was a step too far for her in my opinion. Malcolm was, in effect, a bit-player, mostly shorn of the small role he has; there are too many other examples. That said, Michael Fassbender gave an almost creditable/credible performance as the eponymous hero but he had a mangled text to work with.
The Scottish accents were a curious mishmash of the genuine (i.e. the role was actually played by a Scot) and the dreadful made up, modern-day "Glasgow" accents that the BBC seems to trot out when it wants to do something about Scotland and show it elsewhere. That said, the diction was very poor - we certainly do not need declamation a la Henry Irvine but having lines mumbled in a hoarse "tough guy" whisper (a la Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry) was neither helpful nor illuminating.
The choice of locations was quite bizarre - some were very good and atmospheric - conveying extremis well but others were, it seems, simply plucked at random from something like the Lord of the Rings.