Looking for Richard

Largely successful on the part of Al Pacino, LOOKING FOR RICHARD is a foray into the actor's ideas about Shakespeare. Overlong and uneven, the film shies away from expert opinions on Shakespeare and instead tries to tackle about two questions that it doesn't fully answer. The first is 'What is Richard III about?' The second is 'Can American actors pull off Shakespeare'? The answers to these questions are 'look it up on wikipedia' and 'yes', but Pacino looks into the questions over the course of 2 + hours. Annoyingly unknowing, but obviously knowing this to thus show what the play is about, LOOKING FOR RICHARD never really succeeds at explaining what the play is about because it does so in confusing rambles by Pacino that oversimplify the play, but does however convince us that American actors can pull of Shakespeare because no shit sherlock, of course they can and any notion otherwise is just born out of wrongheaded british pretension that doesn't take into account that the speakers in Shakespeare's time would sound like inner-city people in present-day America. Pacino never goes this deep though, and his scattery film shows this also. I wouldn't say, however, that I disliked LOOKING FOR RICHARD. Many people will, especially due to the length and the lack of substance within that length, but, for me, being used to long films, I found Pacino to be extremely likable despite the film that surrounds it. Still, however, this is not technically a good film at all.
Looking for Richard: ★★