A new Shakespeare film offered the perfect opportunity for me to return to writing reviews and to my roots as a college English major.

What’s It About? After a chance encounter with a mysterious group of witches, Scottish warrior Macbeth is driven to murder his king and seize the crown for himself, with dire consequences for all involved.

STRAIGHT UP: Somber and violent, soulless and boring. 2/5

What I Liked

Sean Harris as Macduff – Harris puts more emotion into the two or three key scenes he’s given than the other cast puts into the rest of this movie combined.

Each frame a painting – Many of the shots from this film, taken in their own context, are absolutely gorgeous. Towering vistas, fog-swept battlefields, and forbidding castles are all on full display.

The fertility motif – New scenes are added and others re-staged to focus on themes of childlessness and succession that run through the source material. This is an interesting angle, and it would work to make Macbeth and Lady Macbeth more relatable, if it weren’t for some of the other problems with this adaptation.

What I Disliked

Oppressively dour – Monotonous line delivery, a blaring and heavy-handed score, and liberal use of shadows in composition combine to beat the audience senseless with the weight of tragedy. There’s not even a hint of levity… this becomes dull and difficult to endure.

Relentlessly violent – Obviously, a lot of time and effort went into making sure that the slit throats, vomit, broken noses, and spilling entrails looked and sounded as authentic as possible – at the expense of almost everything else. A new scene, where Macbeth burns Macduff’s captured wife and children at the stake, is striking – but the fact that this seems like such a natural thing for this Macbeth to do should illustrate that something has gone wrong here.

Michael Fassbender as Macbeth – It takes all my courage to say this, but Fassbender is bad in this film. His raspy, brooding Macbeth has none of the human kindness or ambition to which his companions allude, robbing the character’s tragic fall of any impact.

The coronation banquet – This scene, in particular, sticks out to me as one that the film got all wrong. It’s staged more like a creepy, somber ritual than a party that anyone is actually enjoying. Why would Macbeth want to be king for this? In this context, his outbursts don’t suggest a man losing his mind from guilt so much as one who was insane from the beginning.

Murder sex – I don’t know why every scene of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth conspiring needs to have a sexual undertone – or overtone, in at least one case. I guess it’s supposed to be grotesque, but I just found it laughable.

CLOSING THOUGHT: I’m shocked that such an obviously talented cast and crew couldn’t put together a better adaptation of Macbeth. This is a textbook case of “knowing the words but not the music,” as Roger Ebert used to say. As a side note, for all his abilities as an actor, Michael Fassbender seems to have a knack for appearing in some high-profile bombs – at least three in recent memory, between this, The Counselor, and Prometheus. I also have zero faith in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed, which will reunite key members of the cast and crew from this film – including Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and director Justin Kurzel.