There’s a moment in the 1993 movie The Last Action Hero, where the bored and belligerent teenage protagonist is forced to watch a classic Lawrence Olivier adaptation of Hamlet. In his mind he reimagines it as an action movie, where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Hamlet as an uzi-weilding, wisecracking action star, murdering his way around Elsinore castle rather than deliberating on his actions through iambic pentameter. It’s a throwaway comedy gag lampooning an idealised and impatient MTV generation who can’t sit down to watch a play, and yet, it’s the thing that kept popping into my mind while watching Nia DaCosta‘s new reimagining of Henrik Ibsen‘s 1891 play, Hedda Gabler.

Largely recognised as one of the great female stage roles, Ibsen’s Hedda is a landmark portrayal of bored and spoiled psychopathy. The original play tells the story of the titular newlywed, who sets herself on a course to destroy the success of her ex-lover Eilert Løvborg and his new mistress, Thea.  It’s a masterpiece of shifting perspectives and manipulations, headed with a hitherto unseen stage depiction of female duplicity and scorn, and commenting wryly on the social pressures and constraints on women in 19th century Norwegian society of its day. It’s certainly fertile ground for a a bold and brilliant modern reinterpretation, taking the themes and weaving them into a more modern context, and perhaps in other hands that would have been the case.

DaCosta’s Hedda takes the bare bones of the play and relocates it to a fine country estate in 1950s England. Opening on Hedda in the midst of a police interview, it establishes a ticking clock towards some major calamity. The film takes place over the course of one night, as Hedda Tesman, (Tessa Thompson) and her bookish academic husband George (Tom Bateman) are throwing a lavish party to try and secure his place as a tenured professor in the nearby University. However, at the last minute, George’s academic rival, the newly teetotal, Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) arrives at the same party, toting her latest manuscript, and threatening to steal the professorship from under his nose. Lovborg’s presence, and that of her mistress and co-author Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots) sparks a jealous and vindictive streak in the possessive and bored Hedda. She sets out, together with the lascivious, and equally amoral Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), to wreak havoc in their lives, and try to ruin their happiness.

On the face of it, this is a really interesting concept, and as with Nia DaCosta’s previous directorial efforts, such as Candyman and Little Woods, it’s technically well made, with Sean Bobbit‘s cinematography never failing to keep things onscreen interesting to look at. Similarly, Hildur Guðnadóttir‘s bombastic score keeps the action moving at a pace and underlines the emotions with suitable percussive strains. It’s also plain to see that the cast are, mainly, doing their utmost to sell these characters, with Hoss as the absolute standout, taking the gender-flipped Lovborg and turning her into a far more rounded and empathetic character than the play’s original. A lengthy scene where she drunkenly holds court to a leering room full of dusty old academics is equal parts amazing and heartbreaking.

It’s a shame then that one of the weakest links in the piece is Tessa Thompson. On the face of it, Thompson’s now somewhat played-out screen persona as a sarcastic, offhand boss-bitch is well practiced. Her Hedda feels not a million miles from her moments of drunken scorn as Valkyrie in the MCU, or as the manipulative Delos upper-management executive Charlotte Hale in Westworld. And yet, in Hedda, she plays every emotion with no subtlety at all, gurning and grinning, or muttering insults barely sotto-voce in ways that border on the pantomime. It’s even more bizarre as the film continually tries to convince that the characters around her are entirely mystified by her lies and deceptions despite this. It also doesn’t help that Thompson delivers all of her dialogue in a weirdly inconsistent posh English accent that rarely sounds convincing even when it isn’t straying somewhere into the Atlantic.

All of which is only compounded by DaCosta’s script, which mixes up swathes of the original text for flavour, but then hamstrings itself by removing much of the context that helps explain the dynamics of the characters. While adapting Ibsen’s notoriously dialogue-heavy four act play into a film was always going to require judicious pruning and reworking. In the case of this movie, what seems to have been removed is anything that might give insight into Hedda’s choices. Instead, the film feels facile where the play was deep and insightful. The points which clearly are more interesting to DaCosta, such as a woman’s place in a man’s world of work, are richly and repeatedly expanded on, while the actual characters suffer as a result, Leading to a place where it’s more often just baffling to wonder how this house full of supposedly intelligent people are all so dimwitted, and as a result it’s rather boring to watch.

There are moments where the film livens up, and it’s telling that the film cavorts around the mansion like the bastard child of Saltburn and the opening party section of Babylon, with Hedda running around giggling or leering to the thrum of walloping percussion. But it also makes the rather arbitrary acts of the film, each shown with a sudden roman numeral title card, feel more bizarre. That’s even before getting to the rather questionable plot deviations that occur towards the end. It’s just all too much of a muchness, a mess without sense, and rather like Hedda herself, the film is a garish attention-seeking but ultimately soulless creature. Better to go off down the local theatre and see what new plays are on instead.

Available to stream on Amazon Prime now