"Jane Austen Lite"

Rating: 4/10 (1 October 2005)

This is pure and simply Jane Austen dumbed down for an audience who is assumed to have the attention span of a dead frog.
All the beautiful language from the book is hopelessly mangled and delivered at machine gun pace - "Gabble, gabble, gabble!" Also, I expect a certain standard of dress in a period drama and everyone - even the dreaded Lady Catherine - looked rather worn and shabby in this film.
I've given it 4 stars simply because Mr Darcy is fairly nice to look at, some of the scenes were filmed at Stourhead (where I spent a wonderful day with my other half) and I loved the sneer from Caroline Bingley, who incidentally had the only decent frock in the entire piece (a gorgeous red number).
And as my 80 year old mother says, "No one can beat Colin Firth".