3. William Shakespeare Was A Drunken, Half-illiterate Murderer, Anonymous
After tiring of hair-brained disaster conspiracies, Emmerich went after hair-brained historical conspiracies in Anonymous, his bid for period-drama clout. As it turns out, you can dress up a hack in fancy duds, but you cant get him to the Oscars on that alone. Overall, a tepid and mediocre film, Anonymous is more galling in concept than execution. The main premise of its theory-- that it was not Shakespeare who wrote his plays but Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford--is a stupendous bit of classism. Those who embrace it do so because its unimaginable that a young commoner would possess the mental or social resources to write such stunning work, and therefore, it had to be some high-society fop behind the pen. The bard was always going to come out badly in Emmerichs version, and because the director himself seems to take an oddly contemptuous stance towards the unwashed masses that helped earn his millions, this rendition imagines him more as Shakes the Clown than Shakespeare. Rafe Spall, son of Timothy, was, at the time, an actor known for broad comedy performances and he brings that same level of hijinks to the role. At the films release, he said, "I played him as the opposite of what the great man is supposed to be, a womanizing, boozy, buffoonish, egotistical actor. So I was basically playing myself." Spall is actually quite entertaining, and reasonably likable as this muddy version of Shakespeare, but that Emmerich insistence that he be an unquestionable fiend keeps sinking whats otherwise an amusing but wrong-headed lark of a performance. No, its not simply enough for this Shakespeare to be a whoremonger and a drunkard, hes also half illiterate (he can read fine, but cant write the words or letters himself) and, ultimately, a murderer. The stupidity here is that anyone remotely interested in this movie was probably turned off by it; Emmerich immediately and purposefully alienates his usual audience, and does everything possible to remind the snobby art-house crowd hes courting that hes the same guy who made The Day After Tomorrow and the original Universal Soldier movie.