The one star performance is by Jeanne Moreau as the aging / dying Empress Elizabeth. Too bad she's gone before the movie's half over. Ian Richardson is satisfactorily sly and slimy, but Omar Sharif helps prove that actors, like wines, do not all age well (sorry to say that about a fellow bridge freak). The role of Potemkin could have been so much greater than the hardly believable boy-toy play it got.

This movie is worth watching because it depicts highly significant times and events often ignored in the US as we focus on our late colonial and early revolutionary events occurring about the same time. Also, for the guys, sure, CZJ is definitive delicious brunette yumminess (but Sophia was better), and we get lotsa good cleavage shots, but in a skin flick, I want more skin.


A great disappointment   September 5, 2001
 5 out of 7 found this review helpful

If what you're in the market for is a collage of pretty scenes, then this is a movie for you. However, if you have any interest whatsoever in a movie with a decent plot or actors with at least a modicum of ability, your best bet is to pass on this one. This movie is simply ridiculous. What little plot there is virtually incomprehensible, the "acting" is an embarrassment to those doing it, and all in all it's a waste of money.


Catherine the Not-So-Great: Wooden, dull, and confusing   March 6, 2001
 40 out of 47 found this review helpful

I had high expectations for this film before release, but now I expect to sell my copy and return to the far superior 1991 film "Young Catherine" starring Julia Ormond (particularly the unedited 180+ minute version). THAT film was well acted, well cast, well scripted, and convincing in the details. This piece of hackneyed, romance novel-level schlock isn't worth the time it takes to watch. If it was any more cardboard, it would be on the grocery shelves holding cornflakes.

Zeta-Jones can't do anything with the lines she's given, and I expect the chief reason guys might enjoy this is to watch Catherine happily hop from bed to bed with a succession of hard-to-distinguish lovers (generally in pursuit of some political gain). But even this grows joyless very quickly. CZJ's boy toys are so drab, listless, and ugly that one wonders what the producers were thinking. Even the bodice-buster elements in "Young Catherine" at least featured a more attractive male lead.

The so-called battle scenes are pathetic: a tiny handful of extras milling about in confusion. The Turks are beaten several times in inexplicable affairs (all fought in the woods, no less) that last about thirty seconds each. A subplot involving a rebellious Cossack chieftain (capably played by John Rys-Davies -- the Welsh are taking over Mother Russia!) should have added drama but instead only adds to the confusion regarding Catherine's true motivations. Earlier in the movie, when she's casually seizing power (coups were never so clean and easy as presented here), she announces her desire to free Russia's serfs; by movie's end, she is blithely executing her enemies in defence of the status quo. No explanations for this apparent sea-change are given. And we're supposed to find this character sympathetic? It's typical of this film's confused treatment of real history and people. There's no depth of characterization or feel for the intrigues and struggles of the times. And several scenes have been shamelessly stolen from other movies such as "Young Catherine" and "Waterloo".

It's a lazy, unengaging movie that offers little. Seek out the witty, intelligent, and lavish "Young Catherine" (which was actually filmed IN Russia) instead if you want to see a genuinely entertaining historical drama.