Henry V Review

Kenneth Branagh announced himself by doing the thing Olivier would not, which was to film Agincourt as mud. The unbroken four minute track across the field afterwards, Branagh carrying a dead luggage boy while Patrick Doyle's Non Nobis swells from one voice to a full choir, earns every second of its length and needs no cutting to prove it.

The verse speaking is the greater achievement. Derek Jacobi strolls through modern sets as the Chorus with total conviction, Ian Holm turns Fluellen's pedantry into grief, and Paul Scofield plays the French king as a man who already knows how this ends. Branagh himself is far better at the quiet calculations than at the rousing, and the Crispin's Day speech comes off as a young actor's audition rather than a king's necessity.

The film also wants the war both ways. It stages Bardolph's hanging and the killing of the boys as atrocity, then lets the battle resolve into a victory it plainly enjoys. Outside the battle the lighting is flat and televisual, castle interiors lit like a studio drama, and the long wooing scene with Emma Thompson lands in a register the previous two hours have done nothing to prepare.