Joss Whedon's Small-Scale Modernisation Of Shakespeare Is More Awesome Than I Could Have Imagined...

Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

"Much Ado About Nothing" is the latest film from Joss Whedon. Like a few other films I reviewed recently, it is a modernisation of a Shakespeare play. The film essentially all takes place in a house and there's the feeling that the events are all unfolding essentially at one party. And considering the whole film was apparently filmed over 12 days while Joss Whedon was on a short contractual vacation from the "Avengers" post-production process, one might easily imagine that the party atmosphere existed off-camera too.



The film features a number of romantic couplings (or potential romantic couplings), but the central one is between the characters Benedick (played by Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice (played by Amy Acker). These two characters spend most of the movie finding exciting new ways to insult each othr (all in Shakespearean dialogue of course). They claim to hate one another, but there's so much tension between them that it always seems implied that they have some kind of past romantic history. In this adaptation any umming and ahhing about whether they have some a romantic history is entirely cleared up in the opening of the movie which shows the two of them in bed together after clearly having slept together the previous evening. I feel it was a good idea to start the film this way as it helps to make the relationship between the two characters a lot clearer and helps to give us a helpful starting point from which to begin the story.

Admittedly this is essentially a Shakespearean romantic comedy. it's all about matching various characters up with one another. So the central storyline is that the friends of these two central characters, Benedick and Beatrice, who are always at one another's throats decide that it would be a great idea to pair the two of them up.



Meanwhile, the bastard son of the king (inevitably when adapting Shakespeare it's easier to keep some aspects the same in spite of the shift in setting, so there's still a king and a prince even though it's a bunch of people at a house party) has decided to cause shame on his legitimate brother. The prince's friend Claudio hopes to be matched with a particular woman called Hero. The prince wants to help him. As such, the prince's illegitimate brother Don John, on the basis that anything that is bad for the prince is good for him, decides to do whatever he can to mess up this romantic coupling between Claudio and Hero.



( Read the rest of my review of "Much Ado" under the cut... )