Ken Branagh... why?

I was watching Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Othello, until I finally gave up halfway through, because I had started wondering where exactly his reputation came from. I have by no means seen all of his films but there's no shortage of crap in them, from his stunt casting in Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, the inexplicable diversions from the plot of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to the hysterical chanting style of Hamlet, or that weird white hairdo he had in Hamlet (God I hated that adaptation).

So I looked back at every film of his I've seen, and I realized I've hated almost all of them. I liked Dead Again, and that gray, neurotic version of Twelfth Night was at least interesting, but that was about it. Once he didn't have Emma Thompson to play off, she went on to write award nominated screenplays and generally be charming and he cranked out a couple aggressively bad adaptations of classic literature. I guess I should have been warned, since his mystique did really explode after his 1996 showdown with Baz Luhrmann over who could do the worst adaptation
of Shakespeare (Hamlet vs Romeo+Juliet) and trick the most people into watching it. A fair contest: Even after 10 years to reflect, I still couldn't tell you which is the least watchable.