The 28-year-old British Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh has dared to attempt to replicate Olivier's feat — his triple feat — of adapting, directing, and starring in a screen treatment of Part III of Shakespeare's "Prince Hal" trilogy, and has additionally dared to give it a completely new slant without doing undue violence to the original text. Somehow this doesn't seem as daring cinematically as, say, Kurosawa discarding the language and transplanting one of Shakespeare's plays into feudal Japan. And somehow Branagh's interpretation, very much apart from any questions of validity, seems not as strongly motivated as Olivier's ringingly patriotic rendition in the midst of the Second World War. Branagh's more squeamishly anti-war/anti-imperialistic posture appears to belong in spirit to twenty years earlier: to Richardson's revisionist Charge of the Light Brigade, to Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War and to Lester's How I Won the War, indeed to Welles's Shakespearean ragout (including bits of Henry V) Falstaff, the brutal battle scene in which would seem to have been a direct inspiration for Branagh's slow-motion blood-and-mud bath at Agincourt. For all those hankering, however, to see the play recited in closeup (predominantly) and medium shot, in surrounding smogs of lugubrious gray-green and yellow-brown, with voices lowered sinisterly, ominously, wearily, depressedly, but with a subtlety that at this distance is proportionately the equal of Victorian melodrama on stage — well, this is just the ticket. What it's not is a movie worthy of the name. Yes, yes, yes, the post-battle tracking shot is an impressive piece of cinematography, but the music during it is somewhat overhelpful (as it was during the pre-battle oration), and the actual staging of it is not without its folly (Henry and the Dauphin stopping what they're doing, midway through, and glaring at one another like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed at the end of Round Ten). And the delightful wooing scene immediately following is even more irreconcilably out of tune than usual. Derek Jacobi, Paul Scofield, Emma Thompson, Ian Holm. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd