Postmodern nightmare of Hawaiian sports shirts, pyrotechnical displays, hallucinogenic drugs, exotic fish (our star-crossed lovers first lay eyes on each other from opposites sides of the aquarium), underwater kisses, wedding music by Prince, the Crypt of a Thousand Candles, and a bag-of-tricks cinematic technique. Shake-and-bake-speare, let's call it. The setting of the play has been moved to the present day and to the mythical, or alternative-universe, So-Cal city of Verona Beach. (Ha-ha.) The handguns, to blend in better with the text, are imprinted with manufacturer's trademarks such as "Rapier 9mm" and "Dagger" and so on. Tybalt, alias "The Prince of Cats," can scarcely wait one minute before showing off that trendy new shooting style (invented by John Woo?) of leaping parallel to the ground, Superman-like, while firing two guns simultaneously. And so it goes. Tabloid TV hosts have taken over the role of the Chorus, to fill us in on the background of the Montague-Capulet spat, and a newspaper headline tall enough for World War III picks out a couple of key words for emphasis: "NEW MUTINY." From those first moments, the task is clear. No other screen version of a Shakespeare play, possibly including even those that dispense with the text altogether (West Side Story, Throne of Blood), has so successfully and completely diminished the poetry of the thing. Pete Postlethwaite's Friar Laurence, alone among the dramatis personae, speaks with real meaning. The rest, for all you can make out amid the din of incidental music, racing motors, helicopter propellers, party noise, and whatnot, might as well be speaking heavy-metal lyrics. Or Lithuanian. With Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes; directed by Baz Luhrmann. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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