"Jude Law immediately joins the upper ranks of the great screen Henry VIIIs" with his "incendiary" performance in this period drama, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Adapted from Elizabeth Fremantle's 2012 novel "Queen's Gambit", the film "takes as its subject the closing, paranoid and increasingly incapacitated years of Henry's reign, and specifically his relationship with his sixth and final wife Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander)".
We meet Henry in 1546, when he is "exhausted from the second invasion of France" and suffering from an ulcerated leg. "He seems a fiery beast initially, but one who is easily mollified by Katherine's attentiveness and her acquiescence in the brutal marital bedroom." Katherine, however, is depicted as close to, and possibly a former lover of, the radical Protestant reformer Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a relationship which, if discovered, could cost her her head. "There are some silly 11th-hour shenanigans involving a MacGuffin necklace and a dose of historical wish fulfilment", but this is a "vividly constructed drama, expertly played".
"Firebrand" is "sumptuously photographed" and "magnificently costumed", and Law's performance is "so gloriously disgusting you can't take your eyes off him", said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But be warned: the film "doesn't play fast and loose with the facts so much as throw them out of the window". And with its shots of oozing pus and maggoty flesh, it's not "for the medically squeamish".
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As a historical thriller, "Firebrand" is "hampered by a pedestrian script and an improbable ending", said Phil de Semlyen on Time Out. Still, it "works pretty well as a political potboiler with the brooding undercurrents of 'Wolf Hall'", and it "catches fire" whenever Law is on screen.
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