An uphill battle, gamely fought. Franco Zeffirelli, using a (for him) subdued palette, is certainly a more cinematic director than, for a close-by example, Kenneth Branagh in Henry V. So much so that if the sound were to be switched off, the remaining picture would appear to be a truebred movie. And the Shakespearean text has been neatly trimmed and slicked-down for increased speed. (He can at times be a bit overliteral and overexplicit, as for instance in staging the "To Be or Not To Be" speech in the castle crypt, or underscoring the alleged incest by having Hamlet dry-hump his mother and then lock lips with her. On the other hand, he doesn't miss a nuance in Gertrude's accidental death.) The largest potential obstacle remains the largest actual stumbling block: how to minimize the inadequacies of Mel (Mad Hamlet) Gibson, acting strategically crazy exactly as in Lethal Weapon. Maybe the best, the only way to have minimized these inadequacies would have been to minimize also the adequacies of the rest of the cast -- Glenn Close, Alan Bates, Paul Scofield, Ian Holm, Helena Bonham-Carter -- and to surround him instead with players more his equal. Diane Keaton as Gertrude, say, and Kris Kristofferson as Claudius, Paul Hogan as the Ghost, John Candy as Polonius, Kelly Lynch as Ophelia. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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