'Juliet & Romeo': a musical adaptation that misses mark

PANNING a movie like Juliet & Romeo is a little like kicking a puppy.

- TY BURR

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 hell.

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.