Amazon's 'King Lear' is a Good, if Short, Adaptation

BBC 2 and Amazon teamed up for a new, star-studded adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins as the famous king.

King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, the story of a king who slowly goes mad in his final years, alienating those who love him, while elevating those who flatter him, until his follies overtake him. Written during the Bard's later years (the first quarto is believed to have been published around 1606), it is also an extraordinarily long play. Shorter cuts run around the 3-hour mark, while "full" productions can easily go for four.

Therein lies the weakness of this Amazon and BBC 2 co-production, which will probably follow the track of 2016's The Collection, and air on PBS sometime next spring. The film doesn't even reach the two-hour mark, leaving multitudes of soliloquies and plot bleeding out upon the floor, slashed to the bone and then some. That's not to say when is left is unwatchable, far from it. In fact, there are times when this production is nothing less than fantastic. The problem in the film is in such a hurry to get through it all, it winds up being the cliff notes version.