Review of Chaplin (2011) by Jayakrishnan R — 07 Apr 2015

With this great cast and interesting way to remind people of the great Charlie Chaplin, I could not be more severely disappointed when the movie finally ended. First the positives, Robert Downey Jr. played a really great Charlie Chaplin.

He got the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin spot on, he looked a lot like him at times, he got Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedy right on, and Robert Downey Jr. was just the perfect actor to play Charlie Chaplin.

The costumes, makeup, and cinematography were all done extremely well and I felt like I went through the movie's time periods. Sadly, those are where my positives of the film end and where I start to name all of the movie's flaws.

My flaws start in the middle of the movie. After an interesting first half, the middle half starts and the movie became more and more boring and slow and I then realized the movie was going to be below average.

After seeing him getting in the film business, we start seeing a whole lot of his personal life and all of the many women he had relationships with. The relationship building was so poorly done because you would just have actresses come on for a few minutes and then they would disappear for the rest of the whole movie.

In the relationships, he would give certain women a few looks and the next scene, he would already be in bed with the woman. It was clear to me, that these type of scenes really felt rushed and sloppily put together and they added nothing to the feature except more run time.

Another thing is that they could have focused a bit more on Charlie Chaplin's rise as an actor and less on his personal life because it wasn't very interesting to watch. During the middle and final hour of the film, it focuses on his personal life and the reason why it didn't work for me is because I thought the way it was directed was bland and I became more emotionally detached to the characters as it played out.

In my opinion, I didn't think a single actor stood out at all in the supporting cast. Kevin Kline, Marisa Tomei, Milla Jovovich, and even James Woods were all completely wasted and none of them gave a quality performance because they were underutilized.

Fresh off of his Oscar win for Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins' performance was just really basic to me and he had nothing to do except interview Charlie Chaplin. The 2 and a half hour running time really hurt the movie a lot and they were multiple times where I was bored to tears.

In the end, this was just a really forgettable biopic and this was not the proper way to honor Charlie Chaplin and this is certainly a movie that I will forget more and more as time goes on.