During the last two years of her life, Princess Diana embarks on a final rite of passage: a secret love affair with Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.
An excruciatingly well-intentioned biopic laced with bizarre cardboard dialogue.
What makes it frustrating as a film, though, are its many sudden shifts in mood. Perhaps, Hirschbiegel could have made a stronger film if he hadn’t been lumbered with the baggage that the real Diana brings and had simply told a fictional story about a love affair between a princess and an outsider. That, though, would have defeated the purpose.
The picture strips her of mystique and a good deal of glamour. It makes her look foolish and us for being so taken in by her charms.
A tasteless, breathless Hello-tastic romance that plays fast and loose with the facts. Any more creepily reverential, and it would be curtseying.
More terrible and tacky than one could have imagined, it will soon be forgotten and consigned to the True Movies channel to play alongside television movies about Karen Carpenter, Jayne Mansfield and Jackie Kennedy.
You don't hear people talk much of Diana's "saintliness" anymore, which is a good thing. Granted a little perspective on her, a purposeful biopic would have tried to conjure a real woman from the babble of myth and gossip. This movie, on the contrary, has placed her even further out of reach.
Creepy weepie will make you sleepy.
The morbid weirdness dissipates early, after which we’re confronted with the year’s direst script, forever prioritising gabbled incident – tiffs with “Buck House”! Landmines! Dodi! – over genuine insight.
Watts, for her part, fails to convince as Diana, while Andrews is too serious and stiff as Khan. But then they are both fighting a lost cause as there’s nothing they could have done to redeem this particularly bad film.
Watts employs a number of iconic head tilts, hairdos and stick-on noses, but fights a losing battle against a film which has neither backbone nor teeth.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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