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Elizabeth: The Golden Age **1/2

In the reprise to her star-making 1998 role as Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett resembles the spawn of Joan of Arc and the White Witch.

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, Geoffrey Rush as her adviser Walsingham, in the sequel to 1998's "Elizabeth." The film is sumptuous, but choppy.
Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, Geoffrey Rush as her adviser Walsingham, in the sequel to 1998's "Elizabeth." The film is sumptuous, but choppy.Read moreLAURIE SPARHAM

In the reprise to her star-making 1998 role as Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett resembles the spawn of Joan of Arc and the White Witch.

"I have a hurricane in me that will strip Spain bare!" bellows this human force of nature, hair and sparks flying.

As the title figure in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, dodging assassins, defending the Church of England against its enemies, and preparing to vanquish the Spanish Armada, Blanchett is an actress of typhoon strength. She's got dazzle and depth - an unbeatable combination in an actress or a monarch.

Blanchett rules. But Shekhar Kapur's sequel to the heady brew of his Elizabeth is pretty weak tea served to a bombastic musical score. Though Kapur alternates scenes of dungeon gloom with those of sunlit splendor, the dark/light dark/light dark/light pacing makes for a choppy moviegoing experience.

The new film is set between 1585 and 1588, a period when the so-called Virgin Queen executed her cousin Queen Mary of Scotland, and immolated the fleet of her brother-in-law King Philip II of Spain (Jordi Molla). It has no shortage of historical drama.

Yet the film's primary focus is on QE1's unconsummated affair with Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen, heavily plated with bronzer) rather than these affairs of state.

Just returned from the New World, the swaggering explorer pays court to Elizabeth by boasting he just named a colony after her: Virginia.

The monarch knows a pickup line when she hears one. Her reply, "And should I marry, you would change the name to Conjugia?", would be a good quip in Latin class but it sounds forced in this context.

Some of the most effective dramas about heads of state (for instance, The Queen or Becket) are displaced romances where the combative relationship between ruler and adviser mimics that of soul mates.

The political intrigues hatched between the future queen and her Machiavellian adviser, Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), propelled the first Elizabeth. "There is one mistress here! No master!" declared the young queen in that film where Kapur, scribe Michael Hirst, and the phenomenal Blanchett made clear that Elizabeth's regime would be undermined if she appeared to be rooster-pecked. Her primary relationship must be with England.

(This said, in its celebration of Elizabethan style, The Golden Age suggests that the royal wardrobe of wigs and sumptuous gowns afforded the queen pleasures otherwise denied to her. Alexandra Byrne's eye-popping costumes for Blanchett fabulously embellish those gowns seen in the familiar portraits.)

Though a holy war looms with Catholic Spain, Elizabeth opts for religious tolerance. "I will not punish my people for their beliefs, only their deeds," she vows. Though her cousin Mary of Scotland wants to kill her in order to ascend to the throne, Elizabeth is reluctant to behead the Scottish queen, as Walsingham wants. In her conversations with Raleigh, who is drawn to her lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish), the queen dreams of a new world where religion does not divide its citizens.

Rush reprises his role in The Golden Age. But in thrusting Raleigh to the foreground, screenwriters Hirst and William Nicholson (Gladiator) fail to dramatize how Walsingham's strategy actually made his queen and country more vulnerable.

In their telling, Elizabeth's war with Spain is the Virgin Queen's ultimate resistance to masculine aggression. See the triumphant queen, in flowing nightgown of virginal white, behold the burned skeletons of the armada from her CGI promontory. See a great ruler and great actress reduced to sexual archetype.

Through it all, whether in muslin nightie, damask gown or silvery armor, Blanchett commands the screen as she commands the royal navy. Her unforced majesty makes a so-so film worth watching.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age **1/2 (out of four stars)

Directed by Shehar Kapur, with Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush and Abbie Cornish. Distributed by Universal Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 54 mins.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (torture, beheadings, war sequences, discreet sex)

Playing at: area theaters

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