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88It's a strong, intelligent performance [by Gibson], filled with life, and it makes this into a surprisingly robust Hamlet.
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88Zeffirelli's production is neither high art nor lowbrow pandering, but something in between.
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83This great Elizabethean masterpiece comes alive in a rich cinematic version that proves the past 400 years have done nothing to dim its uncanny power to mirror the human condition. [18 jan 1991]
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Mel Gibson's Hamlet is strong, intelligent and safely beyond ridicule.... He is by far the best part of Mr. Zeffirelli's sometimes slick but always lucid and beautifully cinematic version of the play.
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Thanks to director Franco Zeffirelli and an impressive cast, both the tale and the telling are strikingly fresh.
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75The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]
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Zeffirelli's Hamlet is lively, energetic and suspenseful. [18 Jan 1991]
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70Franco Zeffirelli's film is plenty pretty. It almost works as a cloak-and-bodkin adventure
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60Most of the rest of this Hamlet effective or lovely as parts of it may be, just keeps sawing at the air in a drafty hall and pouring all its light on Mel Gibson and his angelic stubble. [18 Jan 1991]
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50If Zeffirelli's Hamlet does resemble an actual movie at several points, it's thanks almost entirely to the inventive and atmospheric lighting of veteran cinematographer David Watkin, whose somber, gray-green palette gives the film a dignity and substance it would otherwise lack. [18 Jan 1991]
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50It's acceptable Shakespeare - no more arbitrary than most stage productions, especially the willfully anachronistic ones, or the ones with political agendas thrust upon them. [18 Jan 1991]
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Zeffirelli has managed to make Shakespeare's greatest and most modern play one-dimensional. [13 Jan 1991]
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50Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet is bland.
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50There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable; it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production.
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40This Hamlet elevates plot to a height that retains the play's atmosphere but squanders its thematic richness in a welter of "Mommy, how could you?" melodrama.
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38This big-screen Hamlet, pumped up to operatic scale by overkill director Franco Zeffirelli, exposes Gibson's shortcomings.
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25Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, a senselessly adapted, ill-conceived, poorly acted mess of a film that's guaranteed to frustrate anyone who loves the play and to put everybody else to sleep. [18 Jan 1991]
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25The rest of Franco Zeffirelli's latest Shakespearean outing is so eager to be cinematic, with its peripatetic camera and souped-up screenplay, that it forgets to make sense.
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absolutely perfect.
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JimR.10Energetic, entertaining presentation. Perfect casting.