By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2 cats
Director: Farhad Safinia
Starring: Eddie Marsan | Jennifer Ehle | Mel Gibson | Natalie Dormer | Sean Penn
Country: belgium, france, hong_kong, iceland, ireland, mexico, united_kingdom, united_states
Year: 2019
Running time: 124
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5932728/reference
Thom says: “This film has a troubled history (& is not to be confused with the recent Johnny Depp bomb THE PROFESSOR); after being completed in 2016 it wasn’t released until this year. Mel Gibson was attracted to the project and was origin ally scheduled to direct. Admittedly, I haven’t been able to take Gibson seriously for over 30 years and famously avoid his films but Eddie Marsan’s participation made this one worth a look-see, or so I had imagined. Gibson had bought the rights to the source book THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE by Simon Winchester about Dr. William Minor who contributed several thousands of entries to the first Oxford English Dictionary being compiled by Professor James Murray in mid-nineteenth century England. To make the matter quirky Dr. Minor was an inmate at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after he’d been found to be a killer. First-time director Sarfinia had co-wrote the atrocious APOCALYPTO with Gibson but mysteriously when the film was released the director was listed as P.B. Sherman. We later found out that Gibson & Sarfinia had sued the studio to not release the film, in a snit about not getting enough money to film at Oxford instead substituting an University in Ireland. Then there’s the threat of Penn’s overarching performance; & then the problematically thrown-in romance. It’s all a bit of a mess. Penn ages noticeably over the years but no one else does. 2 cats“