08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Juliet & 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.
