Romeo + Juliet Review

Guns in Verona Beach are stamped with brand names like Sword and Rapier, the courier firm is called Post Haste, and the prologue arrives from a television anchor. Those jokes are the easy part. The harder achievement is that Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce keep the verse intact and get teenagers to speak it as their own slang. Claire Danes is the reason it holds. At seventeen she plays Juliet with a directness that cuts straight through the production design, and the vault scene, where she wakes in time to watch Romeo swallow the poison, is the boldest thing done to the text.

Donald McAlpine shoots the aquarium meeting and the candle-flooded church in saturated color that people have been copying for thirty years. The opening twenty minutes are much harder to defend. The petrol station shootout is cut so fast that the language turns to noise, Paul Sorvino and Diane Venora pitch every line at a scream, and Paul Rudd's Paris is a blank where a rival should stand. Harold Perrineau's Mercutio, in drag on the beach for the Queen Mab speech, is the only supporting performance with the same control Danes has.