Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and William of Baskerville

This movie is a pitiful mixup of "The Name of the Rose" and "Hamlet" (I presume so is Unsworth's book, but I haven't read it).

Already good Hamlet believed that actors could replace the jurisdiction:
"I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. "

But Nicholas leads this belief ad absurdum. Unfrotunately, he's not a brilliant insightful William of Baskerville. He's more of Adson von Melk, but Nicholas not only "laid with a woman", but was a murderer himself. For some reason, everybody sympathizes with him, although he had murdered a man and slept with his wife.

Not only that, the other actors show an incredible lack of sense of reality, and get themselves involved into the matter. They all risk to be killed for no apparent reason. Because they all have noble hearts? C'mon.

Hamlet's intrigue was a well-planed one. Von Melk was bitterly realistic when he left "the Rose" alone and decided to follow the path of the career.

Nicholas is a pathetic hero, a wannabe-priest, wannabe-actor and wannabe-barrister. He's good at nothing, and likes to get involved into ridiculous conversations with people accidentally met on the street. Basically everybody could have killed him (esp. "the King's justice"), and Nicholas was very lucky to stay alive for so long. He gets involved into a pseudointellectual conversation with Vincent Cassel's character but in fact he is quite stupid and operates with no plan whatsoever.

Nicholas is more of a medieval Inspector Clouseau than anything else.

The intrigue is actually quite predictable as well. I knew much sooner than Nicholas that Vincent Cassel's character is the person who killed the boy. The handling of the last 10 minutes is pure nonsense.

Compared to Jean-Jacques Annaud's "The Name of the Rose", Kenneth Brannagh's "Hamlet" or Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", "The Reckoning" is very very poor. Poorly written and poorly directed.

Tom Hardy's performance was excellent, Willem Defoe's playing was very fine. Paul Bettany was pitiful. But maybe is acting was worth the character he played. Maybe this was supposed to be an incarnation of a "medieval loser".

Brzeczyk