Customer Reviews:
Bleak modern Shakespeare.......2005-06-23
This film is a loose adaptation of 'King Lear', and it is necessary to know this to appreciate it. There is a visceral pleasure to be had in watching the film's uses and alterations of the play, as it creates an atmosphere of oppressive suspense. The slow destruction of Harris's patriarch is a painful and entirely convincing process, and the film has genuinely gut-wrenching moments of cruelty and loss, as well as excrutiatingly well-timed black comedy. There is much to admire here.
Slow, boring and very predictable.......2005-06-10
When I initially read the cast list and sypnosis for this film, I thought it sounded like a real gripper of a film. It's the first time in a long time, I've just given up half way through and switched off. You would think that a film with the late Richard Harris would be credible and worthy of two hours of your time. Not the case. Don't bother with this film.
Amazon.co.uk Review
Bringing together two recent trends--British gangster movies and modern-dress Shakespeare--My Kingdom is King Lear in contemporary Liverpool.
Richard Harris, who ought to be giving his real Lear about now, is fine in the early sections as the complacent gang boss who thinks he's above the street-level violence that sustains his empire. His downfall begins when his wife (Lynn Redgrave) dies in a random mugging and he has to divide all the assets he put in her name among his grasping family and hangers-on. Harris works less well in the mad scenes, which are staged in a motorway service-station: these really need the original language to work.
At its best, the film re-imagines the familiar characters in an extraordinarily apt manner: Regan and Goneril are Louise Lombard (as a former model turned madam who oversees a pretentious but tatty brothel) and Lorraine Pilkington (a hair-extended celebrity slut who owns a football team), while Emma Catherwood does Cordelia as Michael Corleone, an ex-junkie who has become a straight student and wants to stay out of the business.
Director Don Boyd can't quite wrestle Shakespeare's plot into gangland, but he manages great character bits: the nastier daughters trying to get one-up on each other with grieving speeches (Pilkington does a horrible karaoke tribute at the wake), sadistic Sikh Jimi Mistry taking off his turban before torturing minor victims and Tom Bell as the customs officer who has been on Harris's case so long that he resents anyone else bringing him down. --Kim Newman
Customer Reviews:
Biased, I Know - But I Love It........2004-01-31
Seeing your hometown on the screen is always interesting in its own right, but having never read King Lear I genuinely did not know what to expect from this film. What I saw was compelling viewing (though not enough so to actually read the book!) and a great, serene performance from an already-frail Richard Harris, in his last movie appearance before his sad death on October 25th 2002. This undoubtably adds to the appeal of the film, as a final testament to a great actor, and also covers up the perfectly fine, if a little bit overshadowed, acting of the other main characters in the film.The scenery chosen to shoot the film, with the dock scene at the end perfectly complementing the bleakness of the situation in hand.
As a brief overview of the plot - Richard Harris plays "Sandeman" the ageing head of an Underworld "family" in Liverpool. His life is shattered one day though when his wife is killed during a mugging. A distraught sandeman decides to retire, and divide his estate between his 3 daughters and their associated boyfriends (including a sinister Jimi Mistry, also in "The Guru"). However, his family soon betray him though greed, and he is left, lost and alone, without a Kingdom.
Rest in Peace Richard, youll be sadly missed.
Product Description
A dark and beautiful film........
Richard Harris ... Sandeman
Lynn Redgrave ... Mandy
Tom Bell ... Quick
Emma Catherwood ... Jo
Aidan Gillen ... Puttnam
Louise Lombard ... Kath
Paul McGann ... Dean
Jimi Mistry ... Jug
Reece Noi ... The Boy
Lorraine Pilkington ... Tracy
Colin Salmon ... The Chair
James Foy ... Animal
James McMartin ... Mineral
Danny Lawrence ... Tigger
Gerard Starkey ... Minder
DVD Review:
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