Dull and anti-climactic

Rating: 2/10 (9 January 2011)

I'm a little rankled by the over-the-top praise for this minor Masterpice Theatre dud. I'm not coming from a historian- or speech therapist's point of view, just an avid moviegoer.
One letdown for me was, well, a pretty big one - after all that speech therapy, the king didn't seem to be that much better off at the end of the film. He never really had a pervasive "Porky Pig" stutter; more like an off-and-on stammer and fear of public speaking (at least that's how it was portrayed in the film). It seemed liked Firth forgot to deliver his lines with the impediment, or else in real life it was not that serious.
The scenes that delivered the "R" rating had Firth being instructed to shout 4-letter obscenities as some kind of remedial. These struck me as gratuitous and inauthentic. This is not a great film, all things considered.