
Branagh just has to be apologizing for something pertaining to his "Henry V", because if his going so far as to cast Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, a man who our protagonist aims to kill brutally, isn't symbolism for him dethroning Jacobi as star of the longest adaptation of "Hamlet", then it's because he even got annoyed seeing Jacobi pop up from out of nowhere as the onscreen narrator of "Henry V".


Actually, maybe this film is supposed to be Branagh's answer to the overt faithfulness to Olivier's "Henry V" of his last Shakespeare adaptation, because Branagh is not only neglecting to go the black-and-white route that Olivier took (Four hours of Shakespearean dialogue is torturous enough to the ignorant, contemporaneous philistines who helped this film not get a buck), but setting this version of Shakespeare's vision ahead a couple of centuries, and pretty much doing the same thing with the runtime. Four hours of hardcore Shakespeare, it better be good, Kenny, and sure enough, it is, being much better that Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet", just as Kenneth Branagh had ostensibly hoped it would be.
