Young wooden actors butcher the Bard

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2001)

It is good that the classics have not lost their appeal, but to dishonor Shakespeare for the sake of a few quick bucks is shameless. Most of the actors delivered their lines like and elementary school English class forcibly reading the play aloud in class. DiCaprio gives a passable perfomance, but Danes appears to not even understand what she is saying (she might as well have been reading from a phonebook). I see nothing wrong with Modernization of these timeless tales, but this film suffers because it tries to hard to cater to the "spending power" of the EmptyV (MTV) generation. Comparing the powerful Merchant Families of Italy with teenage gangs is just ridiculous. The MacKenzie Brothers (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) did a better job of retelling Hamlet in Strange Brew than these slackers do with Romeo AND Juliet.