All The Kings Men: quite simply the worst film I have seen in the cinema for quite some time. We only barely got through it with the aid of a can of beer and guffaws. We just about survived the initial shock of Sean Penn’s ridiculous bouffant hair and even more ridiculous accent. Now I have never been south of the Mason-Dixon line, but even I can tell when a Louisiana accent is lousy. And man jack to a boy nearly all of them in this film are terrible (I will give Winslett a pass cos as far as I can see she gets about two lines in the film). What’s more each of the actors are using different techniques to get their N’Orleans drawl right.
Penn seems to favour the mouthful of marbles method. Jude Law goes for the “not finishing any words” method. Ruffalo mumbles – cleverly obscuring anything he says but is clearly mumbling in an East Coast stylee. Gandolfini has mixed up New Orleans for New Jersey, and use the Ray Winstone method of getting the first line spot on, and then going back to his own accent. Clarkson lets her hair do the talking, with predictable effect. And then there is Antony Hopkins.
I thought he had retired. I hoped he had retired. Perhaps this is his retirement, cos he puts no effort in here.
But then they whole film is poorly structured, never decides who it cares about or why we should care. There is something almost heroic about making a new version of an Oscar winning film and getting everything wrong. A kind of willful ignoring of all the book or previous film gets right. When Penn does another of his demagougic speeches and waves his hands round like Kermit, you wonder why anyone would care. You wonder how anyone understands him. And you wonder how this much potential cinematic talent could arse up so much.