It is always fun to watch older films like this, that seem sort of like a cinematic supergroup in retrospect: Denzel, Emma Thompson, Robert Sean Leonard, Keanu Reeves, Kate Beckinsale (in her debut role, looking quite literally like a fourteen-year-old despite Wikipedia insisting otherwise!). It has most of it's merit in watching on those grounds alone: a fun rom-com with a bunch of stars that you've grown to love. (And also Michael Keaton playing some sort of faux-Beetlejuice trope which is bizarre and oddly endearing.)

The film runs for under two hours. The script is Shakespeare, expertly adapted and delivered. It is riotously funny; the utter lack of chemistry between RSL and the nubile Beckinsale is compensated for by the chemistry between Denzel and Thompson (and, of course, Branagh and Thompson).

It is an extremely good time, if never a revelation or a masterpiece. I cannot get the idea of a double feature — this and The Tragedy of Macbeth, Denzel and Denzel, thirty years later — out of my head.

★★★★

Highlights

A lord to a lord, a man to a man, stuffed with all honorable virtues.