This guy has made 3 of my favourite films ever in 12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Brazil, as well as a host of other great films such as Fisher King, Baron Munchausen and the Monty Python stuff, so needless to say I'm a massive fan. Unfortunately that means I came to this movie with high expectations. A lot of the typical Gilliam traits are here, but unlike many of his older films the cinematography and production values are pretty mediocre, the pacing is off, scenes seem to over extend and the shifts between reality and imagination seem, well, cheap, as were the rather inappropriate jumps in location between green hills and desert.
What bothered me most of all though was the language inauthenticity - Jonathan Pryce in particular was a really bad casting choice to play a Spaniard, he clearly could barely speak Spanish if at all, and couldn't even pull off a decent Spanish accent when speaking English. Why not cast a Spaniard, or a Latin American who can do a passable Spanish accent? He's the most prominent but not the only such example in the film, and scenes between native Spaniards speaking in English to each other also made little sense.
There were of course positives, as in every Terry Gilliam movie - visually the movie gets much better once they get to the final act in an old castle setting, and some of the casting choices (e.g. Driver, Skarsgard and Ribeiro) were good. And the same old Gilliamish odes to imagination, innocence and the belief than anything is possible (even when it isn't) never truly get old. But due to the aforementioned issues the emotional impact just wasn't as strong as it could and should have been.
What bothered me most of all though was the language inauthenticity - Jonathan Pryce in particular was a really bad casting choice to play a Spaniard, he clearly could barely speak Spanish if at all, and couldn't even pull off a decent Spanish accent when speaking English. Why not cast a Spaniard, or a Latin American who can do a passable Spanish accent? He's the most prominent but not the only such example in the film, and scenes between native Spaniards speaking in English to each other also made little sense.
There were of course positives, as in every Terry Gilliam movie - visually the movie gets much better once they get to the final act in an old castle setting, and some of the casting choices (e.g. Driver, Skarsgard and Ribeiro) were good. And the same old Gilliamish odes to imagination, innocence and the belief than anything is possible (even when it isn't) never truly get old. But due to the aforementioned issues the emotional impact just wasn't as strong as it could and should have been.