TWOK by a country mile.
Count me as one of the minority who was seriously underwhelmed by TUC. It's not a bad movie by any means, just highly overrated in my opinion. It may be sacrilege, but I don't think it's any better than Generations (which I am fond of, warts and all).
My problems with TUC include a lot that has already been mentioned, including the overuse of Shakespeare quotes. In fact, I find a huge amount of the dialogue to be heavy handed and clunky, like it was from fan fiction. The delivery of that dialogue is not much better. But most of all it's the middle of the film that I have a problem with. I like the first act, up to and including the assassination. It has a very dark and moody feel. Then, for me, the film goes off the rails.
First of all, having Spock play "Sherlock Holmes on the Enterprise" just brought the film to a halt. All that nonsense about the search for gravity boots felt extremely contrived, with heavy handed plotting and silly twists that add nothing to the film. It's like they made the movie, found out it was 20 minutes short, and went back and inserted a whole superfluous story arc just to pad things out.
Meanwhile, Kirk and McCoy's storyline on the prison planet is better, but not much. There was some good character moments between the two, but also more silliness (in particular the fight between the two Kirks was painful, and some of Shatner's worst acting). As others have mentioned, the tracking device plot twist was just silly. You are telling me Kirk is arrested, transported to the Klingon homeworld, put on trial, convicted, transported to a prison planet, and he never changes out of his uniform? And nobody thinks to search him in all that time?
Things pick up at the end of the film, but ultimately TUC just has too many silly contrivances and too much heavy-handed dialogue for me to really love it.
