A right royal disappointment?

She’s scooped the jackpot at award ceremonies this year for her role as The Queen, but has the success of Helen Mirren masked what was, in fact, a flawed and very average movie?
DVD viewers have the chance to make their minds up on March 19 as the movie hits Shropshire stores.
But this week I was contacted by a would-be film reviewer called Mike Willmott, from Shrewsbury, who wasn’t taken in by the furore. And he wasn’t alone.
Here, in his own words, is what he made of the award-winning British drama after a trip to the local flicks:

“ ’Twas on a Monday night in what one might have thought to be royalist, loyalist, monarchist Shrewsbury. I feared exclusion from the last showing, with a tail-back queue. No such thing.
A muted, scattered mish-mash of people waited tolerantly through the unending trailers and adverts, which inadvertently provided the only entertainment of the evening. Come back Guinness - all is forgiven.

Afterwards we all agreed about a massive sense of unenthusiasm, a questioning bewilderment, a grudging admission of certain qualities, but the inexorable recognition of crucial absences. Where was the action? Where was the scintillating dialogue? Where were the new insights? Where was the passion? Where was the rebellion? Where was the counter to bland rehearsal of home truths - about us Brits and our monarchy?
Except that they are not our monarchy truly - not felt proudly to be, as they may have been briefly fifty years ago at Elizabeth II’s accession. Their apartness, irrelevance, powerlessness was charted with a kind of precise boredom and tiredness.
Only the Highlands with their magnificence could begin to convey a sense of some kind of wonder. And then the doughty Land Rover broke down, and the Queen’s front drive shaft broke mid-stream, and the dreadful chocolate-box stag scene got under unlikely way.
The affairs of monarchy became as irritating as the corgis. Prince Philip’s term of endearment for his beloved - ‘Cabbage’ - reflected the mushy, watery feel of the whole uninvestigative piece. His simple, inapposite remedy for grieving grandchildren at the death of one magnificent human beast was to divert them to the pursuit of a furry other one.
What did we learn new about the seven days post-death of Lady Diana? What did we experience with fresh insight? Perhaps one Tony Blair speech stood out, when he became exasperated at last with the spaniel toadying and anti-monarchical crude cynicism of Alistair Campbell, and had the guts to defend the Queen’s undeniable integrity and singleness of purpose. For me, the purpose-built hanging-chamber for the garrocking of the stag stood out, epitomising the outdated irrelevance and embarrassing distastefulness of a whole way of life.
Only Cherie Blair achieved anything that might be called vitality - of completely the wrong, hollow, self-weaning, self-centred variety, caught in her crooked reluctant half-curtsy. But Helen Mirren’s Queen was a disturbing, admirable enactment - a pulling on of the clothes and manners and voice of the tired expectancy of the un-fair state. The ‘institution’ (pronounced with delicious acerbity) was demonstrated to have run out of steam, but so had the Brits - the English anyway ( - where were the Welsh and Irish, at all at all?) - to be superceded by media gnomes and journalist moguls. The film dismayed me by reflecting the loss of way, the loss of faith in anything, the vacuousness of a rudderless society, and perhaps a rudderless film industry.
Though apparently statistically a box office success, one wonders what enduring impact this small chunk of dismal national story-telling will have. Roll on the History Boys and some Alan Bennett perceptions about English life, with some relish and sharpness, and none of this tired regret for national neuterdom.
(There was, of course, Helen Mirren’s stupendous impersonation.)”

* Anyone else fancy penning their thoughts about a movie they’ve watched recently? Email cjones@shropshirestar.co.uk