For a movie I fully had hope would be better than it’s average rating this end result for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is catastrophic. It’s been a while but I remembered enjoying Branagh’s directorial vision with Hamlet, the idea of De Niro playing this disappearing into a character role was so enticing, the supporting cast with names like Helena Bonham Carter, Ian Holm, and John Cleese raised my hopes even higher, and Frank Darabont on the writer’s team (especially as i’m rewatching the early TWD seasons) added even more to the intrigue, yet the end result borders on offensive to not only Mary Shelley (fully putting her name in the title is just crazy) but filmmaking and storytelling in general. I have no choice but to start with the script as it was easily some of the worst I’ve ever seen but for reasons that are rare in the conversation of my least favorite scripts. If you were to take a shot every time the movie cuts to a new scene and set you’d seriously be dead within the first half hour and while it has an impressive score and some moments of good looking cinematography the impact either of those things could have is completely nullified by the horrifically quick scene transitioning. And the actual dialogue writing of that script doesn’t give the elite cast much to work with at all, even the director himself Branagh turned in what might be the worst performance of his career, and where the ‘worst performance of his career’ talk leaves the maybe category is with De Niro who’s straight up bad here which shocked me, and even impressive actors like Ian Holm that I’ve loved for movies like Alien and The Fifth Element struggled to do anything at all with this script. That leaves out Helena Bonham Carter who I thought was easily the best here, even though her writing was just as weak and she naturally struggled with it at a few points she was definitely my favorite cast choice out of all of them and her performance matched that. That’s about where I’m done with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there’s the slightest chance I could revisit it someday if I ever decide to binge De Niro’s filmography but even then it’d take a lot of convincing for me to give this another try, I’m sad to say it because I truly had high hopes but it’s just so soulless from the first minute to the last and one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time.
For a movie I fully had hope would be better than it’s average rating this end result for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is catastrophic. It’s been a while but I remembered enjoying Branagh’s directorial vision with Hamlet, the idea of De Niro playing this disappearing into a character role was so enticing, the supporting cast with names like Helena Bonham Carter, Ian Holm, and John Cleese raised my hopes even higher, and Frank Darabont on the writer’s team (especially as i’m rewatching the early TWD seasons) added even more to the intrigue, yet the end result borders on offensive to not only Mary Shelley (fully putting her name in the title is just crazy) but filmmaking and storytelling in general. I have no choice but to start with the script as it was easily some of the worst I’ve ever seen but for reasons that are rare in the conversation of my least favorite scripts. If you were to take a shot every time the movie cuts to a new scene and set you’d seriously be dead within the first half hour and while it has an impressive score and some moments of good looking cinematography the impact either of those things could have is completely nullified by the horrifically quick scene transitioning. And the actual dialogue writing of that script doesn’t give the elite cast much to work with at all, even the director himself Branagh turned in what might be the worst performance of his career, and where the ‘worst performance of his career’ talk leaves the maybe category is with De Niro who’s straight up bad here which shocked me, and even impressive actors like Ian Holm that I’ve loved for movies like Alien and The Fifth Element struggled to do anything at all with this script. That leaves out Helena Bonham Carter who I thought was easily the best here, even though her writing was just as weak and she naturally struggled with it at a few points she was definitely my favorite cast choice out of all of them and her performance matched that. That’s about where I’m done with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there’s the slightest chance I could revisit it someday if I ever decide to binge De Niro’s filmography but even then it’d take a lot of convincing for me to give this another try, I’m sad to say it because I truly had high hopes but it’s just so soulless from the first minute to the last and one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time.
