When in doubt, turn to Shakespeare. Or, at least claim you've turned to Shakespeare. He's one of the few people it's sort of cool to plagiarise.

And he is like the potato, he can be used for anything. Unlike another giant of the theatre, Henrik Ibsen, his plays are not part and parcel of their original historical setting. I've seen Shakespeare set in outer space in a galaxy far far away, and in the caves of the stone age, and by golly, it works. So why not in 10th century China? After all, Kurosawa populated The Bard with samurais on more than one occasion.

Next up on the list of film makers who've taken a puff off that bard-bong is Chinese director Feng Xiaogang, who's cribbed a thing or two from "Hamlet" for his new movie "The Banquet" ("Ye Yan").

The Emperor has died. And his brother (Ge You) is set on not only laying claim to his throne, at the expense of the crown prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu), who has been exiled to an artist's academy in the wilds, but also his wife, Empress Wan (Zhang Ziyi).

In a twist on the incestuous sub-text of the original play, the Empress is here the prince's stepmother, and actually a couple of years his junior. She was, and is, secretly in love with the prince, but loves power and position more, and is not afraid to do whatever it takes to gain it (shades of another Shakespeare play, "Macbeth"). There's also the politic minister (Ma Jingwu), his son (Huang Xiaoming), and his daughter Qing Nu (Zhou Xun), the tragic Ophelia, whose unrequited love for the prince leads her to her undoing.

All the players are brought together, and the play to a head, at the grand banquet the Emperor has ordained.

At one point a character says that young women tend to be overly fond of sweets. And with Oscar-winning production designer Tim Yip setting the stage, there's no lack of eye-candy, be it the bath of every woman's dreams, or imperial guards like samurai by way of Conan the barbarian. Action choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, another "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" alumnus, creates an otherworldly ballet in blood and mimes, which teeters on the edge between the sublime and the ridiculous.

It almost feels peevish to raise any objections after such a feast for the senses. But there are a couple of points worth concidering.

One of them actually goes to the very lavishness of the production. It's as if, having seen what modern movie budgets, special effects and traditional Chinese pageantry can conjure up, some directors have grown all too enamoured of it. Am I the only one at this point who could do with a bit more revealing dialogue, at the expense of some meticulously choreographed wire-work swordplay?

But the most fundamental problem with the film is that script writers Gangjian Qiu and Heyu Sheng have either lost sight of, or never caught on to, the core of the source material.

If you strip "Hamlet" of everything but the plot, you end up with just a character who can not make up his mind, and fails to act, when it is within his power to do so, hardly a man to engage our sympathy in anything but the most superficial way.

So what is it that arguably makes this play the hub of the wheel of Western literature, and Hamlet himself the first "modern" man, in many ways? It's the monologues. But, you might say, plays had plenty of monologues before "Hamlet". In fact, the roots of Western drama, in ancient Greece, was the lone actor doing a monologue in front of a choir, stand-up, on occasion, without the comedy.

Yes, true enough. But Hamlet's monologues are not really directed, as in earlier, and most later plays too, towards the audience. No, Hamlet, who starts out as simply a man lacking character in the deepest sense of the word, gains it through talking to himself. Through self-reflection he gets to know himself, and changes himself through the play. His tragedy is that, at the moment he has gained the character to act, it is already too late. And this need not have been worked into the script through bare monologues. The right sort of director and actor, working from the right script, might have charted this course without resorting to a ramrod straight recitation of "To be or not to be..."

Lacking that inner journey, the prince becomes, depending on your mood, either a coward, or simply incomprehensible. And you can sense that the film-makers sense that hollowness at the centre of the character, and have compensated by shifting the focus to other players, making it more the tragedy of Queen Gertrude (Empress Wan) than Prince Hamlet (Prince Wu Luan). But it just doesn't click in an organic way.

Director Feng Xiaogang, who made his name doing popular comedies, has paradoxically used the epic format to move towards the arthouse. And though the film might not merit the Foreign Language Oscar (my favourite in that regard would be Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth"), it is never the less a film well worth watching, if perhaps not meditating on at length.