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Critic Reviews
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If you’re a theater lover who was hoping for an intelligent treatment of the great man’s formative years, it will all seem a bit silly. If you like overstuffed costume dramas with a veneer of literacy layered over debauchery, latch on.
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Will is fun, like a supercharged “Shakespeare in Love,” but the regalia, pacing, and dazzling colors often seem like compensations for a somewhat obvious and awkwardly expository script.
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Too often the show is raucous without reason, but Will sparks to life in a scene where Shakespeare engages in what in modern times could be compared to a rap battle or poetry slam, only in Will it’s a word competition using iambic pentameter.
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It’s not a dealbreaker of an idea to take a famous historical figure and put him or her into a world that makes his or her life more relatable to young folks who come along several centuries later. It works better, though, if the modern trappings flavor the historic character, rather than the other way around.
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Will starts to figure itself out as is goes along, paying less attention to the parts that seemed like bad ideas from the jump and focusing more tightly on the stuff that actually works. It’s a bit of a mess anyway, but I like that it exists.
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As long as Will is having lively fun with the absurdity of its premise, the show is entertainingly dumb, but by the third and fourth episodes sent to critics, that commitment has lapsed into something much blander.
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Will doesn’t seem that interested in Shakespeare as a playwright. And the resulting attempts to shoehorn him into other roles--sultry lover, newly minted celebrity, reluctant renegade--make for a frequently befuddling viewing experience. ... The odd thing is that when Will focuses on its hero’s artistic process, it’s not bad at all.
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It's a mixed bag--of melodrama and comedy, historicism and revisionism--that is always good to look at, if not always to watch.
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The result is a wildly anachronistic historical drama with tons of flair, albeit flair that is neither original nor meaningful. In its defense, however, it manages to be fun--eventually.
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The shifts from comedy to bloodletting can be unnerving, even if the whole thing is unconvincing.
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These opening episodes of Will heave with style at the expense of soul or substance. The real tension of the overall plot doesn’t kick in until the fourth episode, but before that the audience isn’t presented much to hang onto besides a surge of dirty, pretty visuals--and those baubles can only carry a story so far.
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Jul 10, 2017It’s called Will, and its focus lies in its shallow, dull, and unconvincing portrait of Shakespeare. What a waste.
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For all its frenetic pacing, Will seems wheezily old-fashioned, the umpteenth attempt to attract a young audience to great art by modernizing it--except that Will’s ideas of modernity are a half-century old.
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The problem with Will is not necessarily that it fictionalizes Shakespeare’s life, but that it does so in such a dull, haphazard way, with little connection to what makes Shakespeare’s work endure or what makes his time period fascinating.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 26
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Mixed: 2 out of 26
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Negative: 9 out of 26
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Sep 8, 2017
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Jul 11, 2017
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Jan 13, 2018