Flawed, yes, deeply flawed, but not quite as horrible as I was led to believe. Firstly, as one who’s never read the book, I was at first taken with how different this is from the James Whale 1931 version. And through most of the picture I was taken with just how wise they were back then to shelve the melodramatic, rolling thunder plot. It just keeps going and going and gets more absurd and shifts through time and introduces people just to kill them and, frankly, makes it seem that the book was written on a drunken bender. But at other times, and perhaps I must give credit to Branagh’s performance in a film loaded with hammy performances, I was moved by the central character’s fury with, essentially, existence. The subtext here is rage against the machine, something untouched upon in the original film (which is fine because it has windmills and towers and Karloff’s flat head) but shown here in all its frustration and depravity. These moments, chiefly Frankenstein’s reactions to death, are striking, perhaps more so because the rest of this movie blows so overwhelmingly. Now — De Niro. We don’t like to admit it, but sometimes the guy is a fucking hack. And he is a joke here. There is a scene here where he and Branagh are angrily philosophizing in a cave and I flashed on those outtakes of Brando from “Apocalypse Now” that you see in “Hearts of Darkness.” It’s MST3K bad. All said, though, I’m glad that I finally saw this borderline-shitty movie, even if it is 10 years later.