![]() ![]() But the movie lacks the nerve to cut entirely adrift from its literary roots, and grows badly confused as a result. If the whole movie had been done in the breakneck, in-your-face style of the opening scenes, it wouldn't be Shakespeare, but at least it would have been something. When, in an early line of dialog, the word “swords” is used, we get a closeup of a Sword-brand handgun. ![]() There is a fast montage identifying the leading characters, and showing the city of Verona Beach dominated by two towering skyscrapers, topped with neon signs reading “Montague” and “Capulet.” And then we're plunged into a turf battle between the Montague Boys (one has “Montague” tattooed across the back of his scalp) and the Capulet Boys. We see newspaper headlines (the local paper is named “Verona Today”). It begins with a TV anchor reporting on the deaths of Romeo and Juliet while the logo “Star Crossed Lovers” floats above her shoulder. In one grand but doomed gesture, writer-director Baz Luhrmann has made a film that (a) will dismay any lover of Shakespeare, and (b) bore anyone lured into the theater by promise of gang wars, MTV-style. The desperation with which it tries to “update” the play and make it “relevant” is greatly depressing. ![]()
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