Please don't let any more films like this get made. Somebody draft a law.

Rating: 5/10 (20 July 1999)

`Romeo and Juliet', but with gangs. How audacious. How cleverly handled. I refer, of course, to `West Side Story', which didn't pretend to adapt Shakespeare, but rather adapted the same basic story that Shakespeare himself adapted when he wrote the play. For you can't have it both ways. You can cut yourself adrift from Shakespeare, force yourself to tell the story from scratch, and take a genuine risk; or you can create another performance of the play itself, in which case you will have to pay more than cursory attention to it. For instance, if Luhrmann had re-read the play, he would have noticed that it is set not in modern day Florida but in Renaissance Italy. Oops!
This modern fashion for being counter-suggestible is now very old and more tiresome than it ever was. Can you really imagine Shakespeare sitting down and saying, `I've written this rather neat tragedy about two people called Romeo and Juliet, but I can't decide on a setting. Modern-day England? That's not a bad idea. The moon? That, too, is feasible ... Ah, what the hell, I'll use Italy, but that's just my preference: do what you want.' More offensive still is a Shakespeare with this frame of mind: `Having written Romeo and Juliet, I notice that I've set it in the past. THAT was a foolish mistake. Young people these days are much too stupid to understand anything set in the past - but they'll surely watch the play if I make a big deal about how hip and trendy I am, and if my characters are dressed in the latest fashions. So, with just a few trivial changes ...'
This is an outrage. Everyone does it these days, and has for decades, but that doesn't make it any less of an outrage. It just makes the pretence of originality harder to take.
P.S.: I really ought to disclose the fact that I haven't seen this film; and, of course, I never will. Some might say this is a reason not to comment on it. I agree in general. But if a movie is a bad one, then surely there is SOME way of finding out about this, other than by watching it?