REVIEWED - TRISTAN & ISOLDE: The original American title of Kevin Reynolds's dreary retelling of a story already told often enough, was, annoyingly, Tristan + Isolde. The decision to separate the lovers' names with a mathematical symbol rather than an ampersand or, heaven forbid, the word "and", was, presumably, precipitated by memories of the success of Baz Luhrmann's zippy Romeo + Juliet.
That Shakespeare adaptation, combining Elizabethan verse with the Butthole Surfers, offered something for everybody. This messy, compromised film - neither high nor low of brow - will, likely as not, appeal to absolutely nobody.
As Wagnerians will recall, the story tells of an Irish princess who happens upon the funeral bark of an English knight, wrongly presumed slain, and coaches the blood back into his veins. Later, after a bit of jousting and some anachronistic versifying - we hear John Donne, a millennium too early - Isolde ends up married to Tristan's boss (Rufus Sewell). While he is planning ways of uniting England's warring tribes, the lovers writhe sweatily beneath bridges, before moaning about perfidious fate. A happy ending seems unlikely.
The numerous sword fights may alarm frail creatures, but the battles are insufficiently bloody to appeal to gorehounds. The action should prove too slow for punters with short attention spans, but the unconvincing pre-medieval sets, modelled, it seems, on the covers of Enya albums, will only outrage serious-minded spectators.
Worst of all, playing the star-crossed couple, James Franco (about to cry) and Sophia Myles (recovering from a recent blub) generate scarcely enough chemistry to dissolve a Disprin, let alone spark up a romance sufficiently volatile to resonate through the ages. After his hugely enjoyable adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, we might have expected something more arresting from Reynolds than I Was a Teenage Lancelot.
Thank goodness for Bronagh Gallagher. Her spirited turn as Isolde's maid almost compensates the puzzled viewer for the perplexing non-appearance of Brendan Gleeson.
