Film review: Operation Mincemeat 

Star-studded war film about a real-life mission to fool the Nazis

“You should really put in some kind of training before submitting yourself to this Viking Braveheart,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. An adaptation of the Norse folk tale that inspired Hamlet, the film is “a beast” – a “grunting, howling, gore-soaked tangle of blood, muscle and vengeance” that is both “incredibly violent and magisterially strange”. The tale revolves around Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a prince who, as a boy, watched his uncle (Claes Bang) murder his father before carrying off his mother (Nicole Kidman) and seizing the throne. Amleth flees overseas but returns to the kingdom as an adult, transformed by the intervening years into a hulking Viking “berserker” with a “heart of cold fire” that is now bent on revenge. “The film feels not so much shot and edited as dropped from the sky by ravens and beaten into shape in a smithy.” I loved it.

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