Director Kenneth Branagh -- not Mary Shelley -- has obviously done some dutiful research on the Romantic Era from which the original novel sprang. (Correct full title: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.) And the products of these researches have armed him with an excuse for any old expressive excess, and more specifically a stupefyingly literal interpretation of Sturm und Drang: lots of thunder and lightning, combined with lots of clamorous and clangorous background music from Patrick Doyle, combined with lots of chest-heaving and lung-expanding emoting (Branagh again, principally, this time in front of the camera), combined with lots of frantic camerawork and cutting. All this inordinate frenzy points toward an unbecoming immaturity on the part of a film director going over such old and well-trod ground. It's true that the movie makes us wait a while to get a familiar toehold, starting out in medias res in the Arctic Ocean so as to give us something to look forward to throughout the boring preliminaries, and then flashing all the way back to the death of Frankenstein's mother, to his marriage proposal to Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), and to his broadening of horizons in med school ("I see. So electricity is the key"). And it's true, too, that we have never seen or heard a monster quite like that of Robert De Niro: head like a Spalding baseball sewn together by a blind man; voice like a punch-drunk Brooklyn palooka. These would be negligible gains if they could be seen as gains at all. Maybe they could be seen that way if you watched the movie standing on your head. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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