Shakespeare gets malled in ‘Juliet & Romeo’
“Juliet & Romeo” — 1 star
Panning a movie like “Juliet & Romeo” is a little like kicking a puppy. A puppy that chews the furniture, soils the rugs and projectile vomits on the guests, but a puppy nevertheless. This maladaption of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” only wants to please its target audience of early-middle-school girls by replacing iambic pentameter with lots and lots of pop songs, swooning with plastic sentiments and machine-tooled harmonies. Replace the Bard with a Top 40 production team and his soliloquies with sub-Swiftian lyrics (Taylor, not Jonathan) and you can imagine the results. This isn’t a movie, it’s a prom theme.
It’s also preferable to sitting through English class, I guess, although any parents shepherding a group of 11-year-olds to a showing may find “Juliet & Romeo” a very special kind of heck. Written and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart, with songs by Evan “Kidd” Bogart and Justin Gray, the movie unfolds in a Renaissance-mall Verona under siege from both Rome and the pope, with Prince Escalus (Rupert Graves) trying to decide which of two feuding clans will best suit his ambitions. Lords Montague (Jason Isaacs) and Capulet (Rupert Everett) vie for power while Lady Capulet (a waxen Rebel Wilson) schemes in the background.
Romeo (Jamie Ward of “His Dark Materials”) mopes about while his hot-blooded friend Mercutio (a hectic Nicholas Podany) tweaks the pride of Tybalt (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) of the rival Capulets. But then Romeo spies Juliet (Clara Rugaard) in the hallway between classes — sorry, in the courtyard between sword-fighting contests — and is instantly smitten. Exactly why is never clear; Rugaard is a capable actress but an ordinary screen presence, and she never conveys much passion beyond a hot crush. When your Romeo is prettier than your Juliet — well, you’re probably speaking to your demographic.
“Juliet & Romeo” seems primarily designed as a canvas for its relentless musical score (also by E. Kidd Bogart and Gray) — which, small mercies, drowns out much of the dialogue — and for characters declaring their feelings in songs that start out at Contemporary Hit Radio gale force and ramp up from there. The lyrics are pablum. Sings Veronica (Martina Ortiz Luis) to her lover Mercutio: “I see your head in the clouds/ And, baby, I know how to bring you down/ Hey, hey, I’m feeling it now/ So lay back and let me take off your crown.” A few scenes later, Juliet and Romeo musically muse, “Why do they always call it falling in love/ When the last thing you’d ever want to do is fall?”
Shakespeare this ain’t. In the long, long history of “Romeo and Juliet” movie adaptations, “Juliet & Romeo” lands well below the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and just above 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” in which the characters are portrayed as animated garden gnomes.
The Bogart brothers are sons of Neil Bogart, of Casablanca Records fame in the disco era, and they and co-songwriter Gray have bona fides in the modern music industry that don’t extend to making “Juliet & Romeo” anything but laughable to anyone who isn’t still wearing braces. They’ve hired ringers with strong voices in supporting roles — Luis, singer-songwriter Tayla Parx, Grammy winner Ledisi — but left the leads twisting in the winds of lip-synching and Auto-Tune while they fill the screen with extras madly spinning in Elizabethan finery. The last time I saw this much twirling was at a Grateful Dead concert.
Most of the adults look vaguely embarrassed to be here, except for Dan Fogler as the Apothecary (who turns out to be smuggling Jews out of Verona when he isn’t singing comic-patter numbers) and one genuine Shakespearean, Sir Derek Jacobi, as the Friar. Jacobi, bless his hambone soul, treats the part as if it were opening night at the Globe Theatre.
Bits of dialogue from this and other Shakespeare plays occasionally surface like clams in chowder: “Our revels now are ended” from “The Tempest” and “all’s well that ends well” from, well, YOU know. “What’s in a name?” pops up a number of times except where it’s supposed to. None of this is a crime against humanity, and I was inclined to give “Juliet & Romeo” an extra half star just for being a harmless chunk of multiplex matinee zirconium. But then I got to the end, and the idea of subjecting young audiences to actual dramatic tragedy was apparently deemed a bridge too far. Spoiler alert: Romeo and Juliet live. BAD puppy.
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In theaters. Rated PG-13 for some violence, bloody images and suggestive material. 121 minutes.