William Tell review – limbs fly as Claes Bang’s medieval hero rallies a Swiss army

Nick Hamm lets rip with some gonzo Game of Thrones craziness in his retelling of the William Tell myth with a blue-chip cast. Limbs get chopped off in a style I haven’t seen since the days of Monty Python’s Black Knight. It’s the story of the 14th-century Swiss folk hero and crossbow artist, a peaceful farmer and huntsman who has endured continual tyranny and humiliation at the hands of his Austrian Habsburg masters, and finally rises up against them on a coward-of-the-county basis; the flashpoint being made to shoot an apple from his son’s head for the sneering amusement of the Habsburg nobleman Gessler.

It’s adapted by Hamm from the 1804 play by Schiller (not many action movies can boast that), but gives Tell a Muslim wife and adopted son that Schiller didn’t imagine; a flashback reveals this to be the result of Tell’s experiences in the Crusades, a time of bigoted cruelty. Hamm inserts into his movie some outrageous and enjoyable cod-Shakespearean dialogue.

Claes Bang plays Tell, Golshifteh Farahani is his wife Suna and Connor Swindells is the despicable Gessler – wearing a sumptuously armoured Black Prince outfit normally only to be seen in certain techno fetish clubs. Ben Kingsley is the evil Austrian king with a deliriously designed eyepatch and Jonathan Pryce is the correspondingly decent Swiss monarch. Jonah Hauer-King plays the Swiss courtier Rudenz, who is fatefully tempted into making some sort of collaborationist (neutral?) deal with the Habsburgs, his head turned by the Austrian king’s niece, Bertha (Ellie Bamber). But she is to side with the Swiss and effectively becomes a platonic Maid Marian to William Tell’s heroic and patriotic Swiss outlaw, who rallies all of Switzerland’s feuding clans and cantons behind him, with Hamm hinting at a superhero-style franchise extension to these adventures.

It’s entirely ridiculous, but performed with absolute seriousness and the result is an innocent amusement.