I have to admit that although I'm a fan of Shakespeare, I was never really familiar with this play. And what I really can't say is whether this is a poor adaptation, or whether the play is just a bad choice for film. There are some nice pieces of business in it, but the execution is very clunky and the plot is obvious. The theme of the play is on the nature of debt, using the financial idea of debt and justice as a metaphor for emotional questions. That becomes clear when the issue of the rings becomes more important than the business with Shylock, which unfortunately descends into garden variety anti-Semitisim despite the Bard's best attempts to salvage him with a couple nice monologues.<br /><br />Outside of Jeremy Irons' dignified turn, I didn't think there was a decent performance in the bunch. Pacino's Yiddish consists of a slight whine added to the end of every pronouncement, and some of the better Shylock scenes are reduced to variations on the standard "Pacino gets angry" scene that his fans know and love. But Lynn Collins is outright embarrassing, to the point where I would have thought they would have screen-tested her right out of the picture early on. When she goes incognito as a man, it's hard not to laugh at all the things we're not supposed to laugh at. With Joseph Fiennes standing there trying to look sincere and complicated, it's hard not to make devastating comparisons to Gwyneth Paltrow's performance in "Shakespeare in Love." The big problem however that over-rides everything in this film is just a lack of emotional focus. It's really hard to tell whether this film is trying to be a somewhat serious comedy or a strangely silly drama. Surely a good summer stock performance would wring more laughs from the material than this somber production. The actors seem embarrassed to be attempting humor, and unsure of where to place dramatic and comedic emphasis. All of this is basically the fault of the director, Michael Radford, who seems to think that the material is a great deal heavier than it appears to me.