See it at your own risk

Rating: 1/10 (28 January 1999)

Go get a cup of coffee, a beer, or a glass or wine. Go out for dinner, or stay home and dedicate to the ancient art of onan. Wash the car, do your taxes. Anything is better than going to see this incoherent drivel.
The film is just not funny. The idea of Shakespeare in a writing slump might have been good, but the forced insertion of the romance element is just concocted to extract some easy sighs from the viewer. How many of them were due to the movie, and how many to the thought of the $8 gone forever, I cannot say. The romance is as deja vu as it gets, the jokes are trite. The material would have been enough for a 20 minutes Monty Python sketch (with oh-so-more hilarious results), not for a full length feature film.
If you want to see a witty film of Shakesperean ambience, go rent the delicious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard.
Joseph Fiennes wears the same expression for the whole movie, and almost manages to make you think that Roger Moore was not so bad after all. Ben Affleck (Ben, how could you go from "chasing amy to this?) acts as if he didn't really know where he is. Geoffrey Rush is confirming once more how Hollywood money can ruin a once brilliant actor.