Review: Goya's Ghosts

Gains: +4
I love period pieces. This film is set during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. I am inclined to add a point to the movie as a result. Javier Bardem portrays his excellent character-acting ability. Natalie Portman does emotional acting very well, even though she does not seem to have the ability to speak with an accent. The plot bobbed and weaved tantalizingly throughout the movie and did well maintaining viewer interest. Though the subject matter was dark, the movie actually had an element of restraint when dealing with the darker images.

Losses: -6
Having said that, there still were a lot of bad elements in the movie. Nudity and violence seemed to be part of the time period. Though neither was glorified and restraint seemed to be the rule, this film still had strong elements of both. While the acting was generally strong, the mix of accents was a terrible distraction. Javier has a perfect Spanish accent to go with the Spain setting (probably because he is a Spanish actor). The Queen of Spain also uses a Spanish accent. However, the King of Spain, played by Randy Quaid, has an American accent. Natalie Portman has several variations of an American accent. Stellan Skarsgard, who played Goya, had his typical not quite Scandinavian accent. Overall, the mix was quite humorous and ridiculous.

So the movie takes you further and further into a dark plot, one filled with twists and horrible situations. A character goes insane, another is executed, another is a prostitute, many are killed in war, and just when you need a ray of sunshine, the movie ends. It seemed that they ran out of film in the camera or a major actor died or something tragic happened on the set, but alas no, they just forgot to write an ending. As soon as the credits rolled, I listed 4 things they could have done to give it a decent ending. They did none of them. So, with no point to the whole plot, the most easy straw to grasp at is that the movie was just a slam against the Catholic church, which of course is obviously full of evil people with evil purposes. Everyone "knows" the Catholics never did anything to help the world. In a movie where most of the characters had both good and bad points, couldn't the writer and director have included something to that affect for the Catholic church as a whole? At best, the writers were negligent. At worst, they were subtley malicious.

Final Judgement: -2

Treat this movie like it has leprosy (not the good kind). Even though the acting is really good, no actor can overcome a bad script ending. Even as I write this, I'm thinking that it was almost worth watching because Javier Bardem's acting was so good. If he hadn't been in the movie, it would have been totally worthless. I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch something else, like ants running about on a windowsill. That would be more worth your time.