If only I could put negative stars on this...

Rating: 1/10 (8 June 2013)

Before I get started on this, I just want say I put spoilers because This review might contain them. A friend of mine was talking about this film with me and he accused me of disliking good films (This and a few others), so I decided to give this another watch. Anyways here are my thoughts:
This movie is awful, the fact that they make the setting in modern Verona wouldn't be a problem if they modernized the DIALOGUE too. Not modernizing the dialogue just makes it confusing,and why the heck do they call their guns, swords?...In my opinion it's just stupid.
The two main leads, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes are the worst actors in this film. They do NOT know how to do Shakespearean dialogue, they come off as wooden, especially Claire Danes who rarely puts any emotion in her lines (then again neither does DiCaprio but a little more than she does), the only good actors in this film are Miriam Margolyes and Pete Postletwaite as Juliet's Nurse and Friar (Or Father in this film) Laurence, but the rest of the actors either don't put any effort into their lines, or they go overly dramatic. It's kind of a shame seeing as they got good actors for this film.
ALSO why make Mercutio a DRAG QUEEN? It's unnecessary and just plain gross and even when he wasn't dressed like a woman he was still annoying. the whole thing is shot like a music video to entertain the MTV crowd/younger generation, but it made ME feel like I was on acid or something.
Now there are some good things in this film,I've mentioned Miriam Margolyes and Pete Postlewaite, but there are more. First the soundtrack is good, and the beginning where they were introducing Romeo and Juliet's parents(Lord and Lady Capulet and Montague) was my favorite scene in this film (But only because the music on that part was friggin AWESOME). Then there's John Leguizamo as Tybalt, who is enjoyable because of how over the top he was, but even that can't save this atrocious film. This movie just flat out sucks, if it was meant to appeal to the younger crowd then I'm not one of them, if you're part of the MTV crowd then you'll probably like this film. If you wish to watch a good adaption of Romeo and Juliet, watch the 1968 version the acting is a LOT better in that film, or watch West Side Story (1961) which actually does the modernization right. I can't say that I would recommend Romeo and Juliet (1936) because I haven't seen that film yet, but anyways those are my two cents on this film, thanks for reading (I guess)