As the latest directorial effort from Kenneth Branagh is greeted with fairly grim reviews, let’s remember a better time — artistically, anyway — for the knighted titan of the British arts. I wish I had a Henry V review written upon its release, but that was a year before I flung my opinions around on the radio. This was written several years later. It’s also fairly brief, but it gets the job done. I’ve gone ahead and changed the timeframe noted in the opening line, which only makes the parenthetical gulp more accurate.

Even if this wasn’t one of the more robust classic readings of Shakespeare in the past (gulp) thirty years, this rendering of the most stirring of the history plays would be worth watching solely for Derek Jacobi’s inspired effort as the Chorus that introduces individual scenes and segments. It’s giddily engaging enough that he is striding through historically accurate battle scenes aloof from the mayhem in his modern dress, a conceit that makes a world of sense given the role, but Jacobi tears into the thick, resounding words with uncommon zest. It’s as if he brings a career of Shakespearean training to bear on every line. There’s a similar quality throughout as Branagh populates the film with great actors who seem exuberant over this ever-more-rare chance to tackle the Bard on the big screen. It makes for a splendid retrospective argument that Branagh shouldn’t have abandoned his reliance on the most seasoned residents of the British stage in favor of the distracting stunt casting that followed.