The Tempest

Writer-director Julie Taymor repurposes the last great Shakespeare play as a noisy, interestingly populated, awkwardly theatrical Helen Mirren vehicle. There are worse offenses in cinema history, but it’s still too bad to discover a deficiency of enchantment here. It is a durable setup: Sailors of various dispositions shipwreck on an island occupied by an aging magician with an axe to grind (Mirren), the magician’s budding daughter (Felicity Jones), a colonized native (Djimon Hounsou) and an indentured sprite (Ben Whishaw); tragicomedy ensues. For the playwright, this was a confident yet wistful self-consideration, and a stirring grand gesture of farewell. But Taymor’s take—liberally spritzed with CGI tricks but not very carefully considered—seems to ignore that point in order to ponder Mirren in the role of a heretofore male lead. Of course she’s great and of course calculated switcheroos of gender have been commonplace in stagings of Shakespeare since the beginning. Aside from supporting-cast standouts including Tom Conti and Chris Cooper, there’s not much to be left with.