The traits of Shakespeare’s Hal, which have fascinated audiences and readers for 400 years are clumsily smelted into an uneasy mixture of narcissism and self-hatred. At this point my impression of Hal is that he’s a somewhat sulky, slightly slimy, sexually ambiguous vampire who seems unable to make eye contact, treats people like dirt, and is no friend of the square meal. Hal surprisingly bests the rebel Hotspur in a bout of single combat rather early in the film, which of course robs the confrontation of the revelatory power it has in Henry IV Part 1. The film does have some nicely framed interiors – there, put that on the DVD sleeve! But storytelling cliches abound – so of course we have to have the hero refusing his quest in the form of Hal refusing to go and see his dying dad (and later refusing to go to war with France) and so on. Initially, he seems more Hal’s Kindly guardian than the gleeful corrupting influence of Shakespeare’s version. His accent sounds Yorkshire to me, but at different points in the film will veer from Mancunian to Scouse to Scots.
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His Falstaff has a bluff rugby player physique and his character is full of bluff ‘wisdom’ to match. Now, Shakespeare’s Falstaff is infamous for being exceedingly old and humongously fat, but Joel Edgerton is neither. In fact, his bad-mouthing of the old man is almost as treasonous as Hotspur’s.īy now we’ve been introduced to Falstaff (Joel Edgerton). We quickly learn that Hal really hates his Dad. We then relocate to the tavern where Henry’s elder son Prince Hal (Timothée Chalamet) is misbehaving. Then we see Hotspur in conference with King Henry IV (Ben Mendelsohn), where he refuses to hand over his prisoners, and spits out a selection of scathing and treasonous insults in his monarch’s direction. The film has a pretty striking opening with young northern noble Hotspur (Tom Glynn-Carney) sending an unfortunate Scottish spear-carrier the way of all flesh.
I tweeted scathingly about this at the time, but to be fair to Edgerton, he has played Prince Hal and Henry V on the Australian stage, and he seems like a pretty open and honest (not to mention talented) bloke, so his vision for The King might just work… The project first came to our attention a couple of years ago when Edgerton made some comments about cutting the “long-winded” Shakespeare speeches and adding some Game of Thrones spirit to proceedings. His fellow Australian David Michôd (who made the excellent Animal Kingdom) directs and co-writes. The film is the brainchild of Joel Edgerton, who co-writes, produces and plays Falstaff. Still, we’ve held off cancelling our subscription in order to see The King. There’s never any Shakespeare on Netflix, the online streaming channel which seems to specialise in teenage shows about Satanism and suicide.