Elizabeth: The Golden Age: Critic Reviews

Too bad Kapur's new, glittering sequel shows up feeling prematurely old, square, and cautious.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy.

Where Kapur's first Elizabeth was cool, cerebral, fascinatingly concerned with complex plotting, the new movie is pitched at the level of a Jean Plaidy romantic novel.

The movie looks beautiful, enhanced by intriguing camerawork and sumptuous production design. But the music is overbearing, perhaps to compensate for the pedestrian script and dull history lesson.

We are left choking in the billows and folds of Queen Elizabeth I's fabulous finery without a single insight into the woman among them, let alone the most celebrated period in English history.

Where's the political sophistication that made the first movie slightly more interesting? That was a decent game of chess. The Golden Age is checkers.

Highbrow camp masquerading as a history lesson soapier than any bottle of detergent.

From its extravagant costumes to its pompous score, The Golden Age is packed with distractions. But the biggest of all is the story itself, which works so mightily to tarnish the queen at its core.

When you see Cate Blanchett in one fantastical gown after another, you understand why Elizabeth's reign was golden.

The Golden Age feels like two movies: one a bodice-ripping romance, the other a study in statecraft and power. But these strands, one private, one public, come together in the title character and the balancing act she must master.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is an unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

There are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production.

It is a silly film about serious matters, challenged by a multiple-personality disorder -- multiple multiple-personality disorders, in fact -- but more or less saved from pure nonsense by Blanchett.

Cate Blanchett returns to the role that made her a star, and though this sequel to Elizabeth (1998) is less defensible as history, as florid costume drama it's just as entertaining.

Through it all, whether in muslin nightie, damask gown or silvery armor, Blanchett commands the screen as she commands the royal navy. Her unforced majesty makes a so-so film worth watching.

Bogus history can make a crackling good adventure yarn, and Kapur piles on the treachery and romance.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a Rolls-Royce, car-crash of a movie -- classy, beautifully made and ultimately crushed beneath its own pretentiousness.

Elizabeth achieved its power by focusing on the central idea of how a callow princess became a great queen. In trying to re-create the formula, the sequel merely grasps about for a reason to be, and that makes for dull watching, indeed.

Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age, from a screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, turned out to be more rousingly entertaining than many of its less-than-lukewarm reviews had led me to anticipate.

Overall, pic takes a small-minded view of history and, in its rush to proceed from one tumultuous event to the next, lacks any sense of occasion relative to the significant pageant it attempts to depict.

Expect a fast-paced, beautifully mounted and well-acted soap opera with overripe dialogue that plays fast and loose with history -- just like they did in the '30s, '40s and '50s -- and you won't come away disappointed.

[Blanchett's] so perfect in the part that you almost don't mind the abrupt ending.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age places its gilded head upon the chopping block right from the opening salvo, replacing its predecessor's cunning with bombast.

This is romantic fantasy, not history, and much of the time you fully expect Kapur, here making his third post-Bollywood feature, to turn his cast loose in song and dance.

Through the miracle of modern technology, the film achieves alchemy in reverse, turning historical gold into contemporary lead.