REVIEW: In ‘Juliet and Romeo,’ Shakespeare gets malled
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.
