Shallow, choppy, unfocused.

Rating: 4/10 (1 December 2006)

For all the hype, and the money and effort, I went to The Queen expecting to discover striking and perceptive insights into the British monarchy. What I found was a tired rehash of the Same Old Stuff. The Queen herself was a completely one-dimensional character, Philip was portrayed as an angry, bumbling, insensitive ubersnob, Robin Janvrin (the Queen's private secretary), a fascinating character in the real story, got about 2 minutes of screen time, The Queen Mother, a wonderfully colorful and classy woman here came across as a crotchety fat couch potato, and a good half the movie was a passable but mildly distracting Tony Blair imitation.
Helen Mirren was very good as the Queen, as I would expect her to be. To bad the script gave her nothing meaningful to say or do.
In fact, what was the film actually about? What a great person Diana was? What an evil thing the Paparazzi are? How much the world loved Diana? How much the Queen hated Diana? How out of touch the Monarchy is with it's people? Or, based on the apparent emphasis of the film, was it saying that Tony Blair is the only clear-thinking reasonable person in all of England and how on earth did they ever muddle through without him? They took awkward, disjointed stabs at each of those things, then like kid with ADD and a double espresso, lurched jerkily to the next thing without looking back.
It was choppily edited; scenes didn't flow one into another, nor was the sense of passing time well-communicated. And with the great chateaus of Europe at the beck and call of a high-budget production, the filmography fell flat on it's face. And enough with the kitchy royal cliché's (the land rovers, the queen's dogs, etc.) Surely they could do better than that.
They should have given the project to Aaron Sorkin to make it as a West Wing episode. He'd have pulled it off beautifully.
After all these years, it's sad that this movie goes no deeper into the real story of the Queen and the events surrounding Diana's death than the live CNN coverage did at the time. It did a lousy job of bringing the story to life, and now that it's been done, the opportunity is gone to do a good one.
So, bleah on The Queen.