5/5 Henry V
  by JP (Honolulu, HI)
Excellent DVD! If you ever wanted to know where the expression "band of brothers" comes from this is it! Great acting.

3/5 Great adaptation, except for what's missing (which is a lot!)
  by Bryan Wildenthal (San Diego, CA USA)
This movie elicits an almost schizophrenic reaction on my part. On the one hand, I can't disagree with the rave 5-star reviews most have posted here about Kenneth Branagh's powerful and imaginative interpretation of this Shakespeare classic. (There seem to be some serious problems with the current DVD rendition, but I'll leave that aspect to other reviewers.)

But I see a HUGE caveat about Branagh's film itself, one strangely and almost entirely absent from the reviews posted here on Amazon: Branagh CUT OUT very substantial chunks of Shakespeare's timeless lines in this play!

This is all the more unfortunate, given the superb quality of the acting, the stirring music, and the liberating magnificence of the production. This could have been the definitive version of "Henry V" for all time, and surely one of the best movie adaptations of ANY of Shakespeare's plays, period. Instead, for a true Shakespeare lover, it is an enormously frustrating cheat.

Now, let me hasten to say: I'm not necessarily condemning the concept of any abridgment or editing of Shakespeare. The Bard himself might well have scoffed at the notion that his every word was sacrosanct; he probably would have cut and stitched enthusiastically to adapt his work to a new medium. Given Shakespeare's classic status, however, a modern adapter should cut only very judiciously. The usual justification for cuts in a film adaptation is time pressure. Yet Branagh's "Henry V" is only about two hours and 20 minutes long, barely above the Hollywood average. There have been plenty of great and popular 3-hour (or even 3 and 1/2 hour) movies. (See, e.g., "Gandhi" or "Dances With Wolves.") True, with the short attention spans of the modern music-video generation, any film over 2 hours risks losing viewers. But surely Branagh was not aiming for the typical shallow modern viewer. This is Shakespeare, for heaven's sake! Surely moviegoers willing to go see Shakespeare would have been willing to invest the time necessary to see an unabridged (or at least a LESS-abridged) version of this classic play!

The deeper problem, however, is that even if it were justified to make some cuts, Branagh does a very bad job of the cutting. Henry's own patriotic speeches and royal ruminations come off very well; they don't get cut much if at all. (Hmmm, could that have something to do with the fact that Henry is portrayed by Branagh himself?)

But several of the lesser characters get the shaft. Falstaff's Boy (Christian Bale, a fine actor completely wasted here) shows up in some early scenes, but then never gets another line. This leaves incoherent and incomplete the exploits of Ancient Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym, the roguish Falstaffian trio for whom the Boy serves as a sort of chorus. There is a moving scene at the end when Henry carries the slain Boy across the battlefield to the strains of "Non Nobis," but the scene would have been a good deal MORE moving if he had been even remotely developed as a character, as Shakespeare accomplished in a few brief scenes (all cut by Branagh).

Gone completely is the entire scene (one of the most memorable in the play, and one of the best comedic scenes in all of Shakespeare) in which Fluellen forces Pistol to eat the leek.

In the early scene in which Henry confronts the three traitors, Branagh cuts out the crucial lines (illustrative of Henry's character, at least as fictionalized by Shakespeare) in which Henry explains that he condemns the traitors to death because of their threat, not to his person, but to the security of his kingdom.

In the scene where the Dauphin of France makes a fool of himself boasting about his horse, Branagh once again amputates some of the Bard's timeless humor. He cuts out the ribald back-and-forth between the Dauphin and a mocking constable. ("CONSTABLE: Methought yesterday your mistress [i.e., the Dauphin's horse] shrewdly shook your back. DAUPHIN: So perhaps did yours. CONSTABLE: Mine was not bridled.")

Branagh leaves in the famous line remarking that "that island of England breeds very valiant creatures," but leaves out the comparison to England's mastiffs, dogs "of unmatcheable courage," who "run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear." This one pained me especially, since my late grandfather and late uncle, who loved this play and introduced it to me, loved to quote that very line. (My uncle was a dog-lover who owned a huge mastiff at one time.)

Leaving in ALL of the above lines and scenes would have added perhaps 15 or 20 minutes at most. That would have resulted in a film no more than 2 hours 40 minutes long, well within reasonable standards. Given Branagh's admirably fast pacing, a completely unabridged version could surely have clocked in at under 3 hours. As noted, there have been plenty of classic films that long or longer.

Too bad this is not one of them. Half a loaf is better than none, but in the case of Shakespeare, one cuts at one's peril!


1/5 NEVER SEND ME THE MOVIE
  by Infodigital Mb De Mora
THEY NEVER SEND ME THE MOVIE, AND ALSO NEVER SEND ME AN EXPLANATION, OR AN ADVISE,

ALSO I'M WAITING THE REFUND IN MY C.C. ACCOUNT.

rEGARDS

mauricio mora

5/5 A classic "guy's" movie
  by T. J. LoVerde (Wilmington, DE)
Superior performances. A brilliant film adaptation of Shakespear's romanticised (and unabashedly Anglo-centric) retelling of the events precipitating and including the battle of Agincort. Romanticism notwithstanding, the story evokes the raw masculine instincts of heroism, brotherhood, honor and glory. Should be a permanent addition to every man's film library.

5/5 If you don't get Shakespeare, get this.
  by PamB2k3 (Elkridge, MD)
I saw this in its original, full-screen glory in theatrical release. Before I did, the distance of Shakespeare's language made his work strange to me at best. And I was a theatre major in college!

Branagh's direction and a simply amazing cast opened my eyes. I never looked at the Bard the same way again, and even went back to reread the plays I had studied in high school.

For everyone that doesn't "get" Shakespeare, get this.