As an avowed lover of Shakespeare Branagh has an odd way of demonstrating his affection. His versions of the plays are vastly edited, adumbrated, hacked and stuffed into curiosities.This one is the most bizarre. It is barely the real play "Love's Labours Lost", which is, by most reckoning, not a very good play, and like many Shakespeare comedies suffers from his often irritating humor. Onto that Branagh imposes musical numbers and then again he has a real in-joke using 1940s newsreel with his arch accent as a way of editing the play which is very heavily cut by at least an hour in length.So he packs a cut version of a play into less time and uses two other artistic/media styles into a shorter length. It's a not even the play; he might have called it, "Some Songs and Dance on Old Bill".Walter Benjamin might have used this film in his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as an example of how facile it is to transfer properties into a broth which is disingenuous.It takes gall and conceit to construct something that is not one thing nor anything else; that is a travesty on any measure. It's atrocious Shakespeare; it's even more degrading as Busby Berkeley musical as no one can really sing or dance; and as a piece of direction it is starchy, inelastic and very English in all the worst of all possible ways.Murder most foul is the Shakespeare line that comes to mind.

Kenneth Branagh's "Love's Labour's Lost" does exactly what it was intended to do: Turn Shakespeare's play into a thirties American Musical. The result is just that. No more, no less. It is as bad as any of those miserable American musical from the late thirties-late fifties. The fact that it's Shakespeare does not arrange anything: Branagh is only really interested in the thirties aspect. Like any of those musicals, it is corny, completely artificial, has no depth. But it also funny, charming, and mostly entertaining. There are occasional times where you will laugh like a madman (one must admit that it's much better than "As You Like It"): Branagh's scream as the King of Navarre pushes the ramp Branagh is on, every second with Timothy Spall, who is hilarious ("Boy, what sign is it when a worthy man grows mel-an-choly- Hilarious, and the whole "I Get A Kick Out Of You" musical number), Miss Marple's monologue and version of "The Way You Look Tonight" , and other things. Overall, this film is nothing more- nor less- than an American Musical, worth seeing just to see how well Branagh pulled off the idea of making Shakespeare's play be exactly like a musical.

I love Shakespeare. I really do. I also am also a huge fan of Kenneth Branagh. His Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About You, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night are all excellent. I feel the problem here is that he tried far too hard to make Shakespeare marketable. I love musicals, especially old ones, as well, but I find something lacking in the combination. And, as much as I adore Kenneth, he cannot dance. This is not Shakespeare's best comedy in the first place, but even Branagh's ambition couldn't save this disaster. The ending is happier than the play's cliffhanger-like promises, which I like. That is about all I like.

I love Shakespeare and I love musicals. I really do. But putting them together is almost never a good idea (the one exception I can think of to this rule is West Side Story, which at least at the grace to disguise its origins).Kenneth Branagh has always struck me as an extremely overrated director. He made a perfect adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, but his Henry V and Hamlet were all about himself. He seems to suffer much from having no Emma Thompson to balance with.This movie was a mistake from start to finish. To begin with, it's a bad play. Yes, even Shakespeare had his flops and this was one of them. It's already a complicated plot that makes little sense with a ton of characters that are impossible to keep straight. So what did Branagh say? Let's make a musical! Bad idea. If you're going to film a bad play at least leave Cole Porter out of it. The musical numbers don't fit at all and are incredibly overdone. They simply don't work. They don't add anything and really seem to take away any chance the film had of being taken seriously. It's just a bad movie.Some people found it enjoyable, and I'm honestly mystified as to why. They may like seeing Cole Porter songs come to life, but they need to realize that a film should either be Hamlet or Moulin Rouge. It should never try to be both.