A choppy, hackneyed mess

Rating: 1/10 (10 April 2011)

If I was going to be charitable, I'd take into consideration that Baz Luhrmann is not a cinematic director, and most of his experience comes from the theater. Unfortunately, given that Luhrmann did prove that he was capable of making a somewhat competent film with Romeo + Juliet, he gets no sympathy. Luhrmann acts like a child given a complex new toy with no instructions how to use it. Throughout the history of filmmaking, directors influence the attention of the audience by letting the actors' performance naturally become the focus of a scene; Luhrmann apparently regards his actors as too bland or his audience as too dim to understand where attention must be paid. To that end, every single scene is a mess of jump cuts, overused camera tricks and forced, ham-fisted acting. Shaky/walking cam? Check. Lens flares? Cartoonish sound effects? Soft focus? Multiple angles of the same scene? D-r-a-m-a-t-i-c-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-e-d d-o-w-n m-o-v-e-m-e-n-t and RAPIDLYSPEDUPACTION? Fade-ins, fade-outs repeatedly breaking the fourth wall? Check, check, double-check. All of these happening once in a movie is enough to wreck it, but these happen so often it's as if Luhrmann was just goofing around in a consumer-level video editing software with a bunch of footage from other films.
The result is not a fulfilling journey into an otherworldly and hallucinogenic world, but a wearying, tedious slog through a vile bastardization of turn-of-the-millennium pop culture and hackneyed film tricks.
It's not even campy fun.