Critics savage Madonna's W.E. - here's what they are saying

MADONNA'S much-anticipated feature film, W.E., based on the life of Wallis Simpson has finally been released, and the critics have not been kind.
 
The film was trashed last year at the Venice Film Festival and was re-edited before being unleashed on UK audiences. But the revisit to the cutting-room does not appear to have made much difference.
 
Leading the slavering pack of attack dogs is Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph. Acknowledging the re-edit, he says: "Like the Terminator T-1000 robot striding away from an exploding truck, its awfulness has emerged almost entirely unscathed."
 
Collin’s conclusion is blunt. "W.E. is – still – a stultifyingly vapid film, festooned with moments of pure aesthetic idiocy. With characteristic humbleness, Madonna performs a song called Masterpiece over the end credits, although one can’t help but feel that her 2003 number one single Sorry might have been more appropriate."
 
The narrative device of switching between the story of Wallis Simpson and that of a latter-day socialite is widely derided.

"Her Madgesty's conceited central conceit – to dramatise her evident self-identification with Wallis using a fictional modern Manhattan housewife called Wally – is a terrible idea, horribly executed," says Colin Kennedy in the Metro. "Every time the action cuts to, for some inexplicable reason, 1998, you can actually hear eyeballs rolling back in heads."
 
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian laments: "The fantastically wooden drama moves in a deafening series of clunks; set-pieces are agonisingly orchestrated, and Madonna's historical perspective is eccentric."
 
Chris Tookey in The Daily Mail variously describes it as "astonishingly dull", "bonkers" and a "colossal, narcissistic bore" while the Daily Mirror's David Edwards calls it "an abysmal failure".
 
The film's nadir, agrees everyone, arrives during a scene in which Wallis Simpson dances the Charleston with a Maasi tribeswoman to the strains Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols.
 
Wendy Ide of The Times describes it as a "now notorious WTF moment".
 
She also marvels at the director's handling of the film. "Of this we can be sure: Madonna must be a pretty scary individual," she writes. "How else would the self-involved folly that is her second directorial outing have ended up being so uniquely, flamboyantly bad?" ·