Honolulu Weekly

In a strange sort of cultural trend, King Henry VIII’s sex life has moved into vogue, becoming the trendy stuff of heady, frilled costume drama. The notorious royal also seems to have lost at least 50 pounds and gained a gym membership. Last year, the infamous ruler was portrayed by Jonathan Rhys Meyers with glam rockstar routine on the cable TV show The Tudors. Now we get the muscle-y Eric Bana from Troy and Hulk in The Other Boleyn Girl.

The film, based on the novel by Phillipa Gregory, covers the same time period as the Showtime series, but focuses instead on Anne and Mary Boleyn, the two young girls who bewitched the King and basically caused England to break with the Catholic Church in the 16th century; or as Queen Katherine of Aragon cattily describes them, ‘the Boleyn whores.’

Of course, Anne and Mary aren’t really whores. That was just the way things were back then, as the movie would casually have us believe since it doesn’t bother to pronounce any genuine judgments on the feminine ethos of the era. In an opportunity for power, the girls’ father pimped Anne off so that the King would have someone to sire a son with, thus protecting the country with an heir. (The Queen ‘no longer bleeds.’) Henry though, takes a liking to the married Mary instead, and off she goes, with her husband’s pathetic consent, to become a lady of the court. Anne is royally pissed and gets sent to France. No sooner is Mary preggers, the jealous Anne returns and works Henry over. He dumps Mary and decides to annul his marriage to Katherine to wed Anne, accidentally beginning the English Reformation. Of course, this all doesn’t end well and someone ends up on a date with decapitation.

The acting is capably over-heated. Bana makes you forget Rhys Meyers’s punk brattiness, at least when he’s not forced to brood and pout, picking at his beard like it’s itchy. Natalie Portman is in Amidala mode as the showier Anne while Scarlett Johansson does The Girl with the Pearl Earring part 2 as the understated Mary.

The main problem here is tone. The movie revels in its soap opera nature before suddenly acting as if you’re supposed to be taking these characters seriously after all, even with their trashy, Korean drama hysterics and historically hazy plot twists. As flawed as it was, at least Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette knew exactly what poses it wanted to strike and what factoids it wanted to gloss over. Had The Other Boleyn Girl controlled its pitch better, it could have been a pulpy bodice-ripping prequel to Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth films.