Tempest

It hasn't been a happy decade for Julie Taymor, the acclaimed American theatre and opera director whose Frida (2002) earned six Oscar nominations (and two wins, for make-up and for original music by her spouse Elliott Goldenthal).

Her triumphant Lion King stage show (1997), for which she designed more than 100 costumes and collected Tony Awards for them and for direction, was followed a decade later by her disastrous disaster-prone direction of, and sacking from, Broadway's Spider-Man musical in 2011.

In film, her adaptation and direction of Shakespeare's Titus [Andronicus] (1999), starring Anthony Hopkins, was critically respected but lost big money (a gross revenue of only 10 per cent of its US$20 million budget). Undeterred, in 2010 she then released her re-working of The Tempest. Its budget was similar, the critics howled, and its gross ticket sales were less than $350,000.

Its lead actor, Helen Mirren as gender-changed Prospera, was award-nominated, and its costumier, Sandy Powell, earned her ninth Oscar nomination. No one else in the star-studded production boosted their CV, and the, ahem, role-call of flat performances includes David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Tom Conti and Djimon Hounsou (Caliban, almost nude, naturally, sporting clownish make-up and middle-aged spreads). Russell Brand is atrociously unfunny as Trinculo, but at least he's playing at his standard level.

Even promising youngsters sound jaded and move wearily: Felicity Jones, as Miranda, and Reeve (Snow Falling on Cedars) Carney as Prince Ferdinand. Sadly for talented Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Criminal Justice), Taymor envisaged Ariel as a genitalia-free nude will'o'the'wisp with ugly make-up.

The film stock used seems to have been salvaged from pre-War vaults. The locations chosen in lava-strewn or wooded Hawaii were not picked for their cinematogenic quality. Most wrongly, Taymor paced out her production in stagy, theatrical terms. Compounding the tragedy of errors, she obtained sub-standard SFX and commissioned tedious or trifling music from her spouse. One small consolation for Shakespeare buffs: the DVD's English subtitles only omit or mis-write a few spoken word. A bigger one is the ten minutes or so cut from the film's official length before it went to DVD.

Is there a word for a movie that lacks depth, vision and visual flair? In the age of 3D, this is a failed 2D movie, so perhaps it can be best categorised as 1D. To be seen only for Mirren's eyes.