WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET (47)

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann

Starring: Leonardo di Caprio, Claire Danes, Harold Perrineau

The Pitch: A tale of star-crossed lovers, set amid modern-day street gangs.

Theo Sez: Impossible not to admire the chutzpah of this bold if misguided reimagining of a classic play - even if it ultimately means losing the play itself. It has affinities with Ken Russell's OTT "biographies" of classical composers, but perhaps what it most resembles is the sampling of well-known riffs and lines on hip-hop and techno records. It concentrates on creating a universe of limitless visual possibilities, making the baroque / unusual settings and locations - a swimming pool, a trailer park in the desert - as important to a scene as what actually goes on in it, and going overboard on the yellow filters and breakneck editing; to which roiling, discordant backbeat it then adds the text, rearranged and cut to ribbons because what's important isn't the text per se but its relationship to the whole, the introduction of a new element into the mix. It's not a worthless strategy - even if it seems a little unnecessary to monkey with Shakespeare - and might even have managed to reinvigorate a rather musty play, if applied intelligently: but the film has no faith in its audience. Not only is any half-opportunity for sexual innuendo grabbed at with indecent haste (the camera moving in on Juliet's dirty leer before she says "or any other part of his body"), but the lines are often repeated to make sure they stick, and it even provides captions - "At the Capulet mansion, the party begins" - for those who may have been concentrating on their popcorn instead of the screen: it seems pitched primarily to the slightly older siblings of Beavis and Butt-Head. Luhrmann would no doubt say that they, more than anyone, are the people who need to be awakened to the Bard's glories - that the film is educational, a springboard to the play. But one suspects that even the dopiest teen will be savvy enough to realise that this bizarre, overheated attention-deficit disorder of a movie isn't much like a 17th-century classic.