Montagues, Capulets, Firearms And Fast Cars

Where art Romeo and Juliet? In director Baz Luhrmann's head-spinning revision of Shakespeare's 400-year-old tale of tortured teen romance, the star-cross'd lovers can be found in Verona Beach - a blasting, smog-shrouded metropolis where gangs cruise the streets in low-riders, the cops circle the chaos in helicopters, and all the squalid ghettos and moneyed mansions shimmer in a dazzling Technicolor haze.

William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the title roles, is a throbbing cacophony of a movie that wraps the original Elizabethan text (pruned significantly, and smartly) in a gust of alterna-rock by the likes of Garbage and the Butthole Surfers. Even the church choir is hymning something different: Prince.

Filmed in Mexico City and imagined as a kind of rotting, millennial Miami Beach, the Verona of Luhrmann's cranked-up adaptation has a distinctly Latino flavor. Capulet clansman Tybalt is a swaggering, pistol-packing hombre played by John Leguizamo; Fulgencio (Paul Sorvino), patriarch of the Capulets, spits his lines in a Spanish-accented flurry; even Juliet's attendant and confidante, Nurse (the marvelous Miriam Margolyes), is a fireball Hispanic.

Everything about this Romeo & Juliet - from the color palette to the weather to the ``ancient grudge'' between the houses of Capulet and Montague - is hot, hot, hot. Sometimes too hot. No matter how radically the play has been made over (from a prologue delivered by a TV news anchorwoman, to the warring families' ``swords'' and ``daggers,'' which are now respective brands of firearms), it still requires a hero and heroine whose blinding love must be made palpable. Although DiCaprio and Danes make a handsome couple - he reed-thin and wild-eyed, she glowing and with a smile to die for - the pair can look overwhelmed by the production around them: the whirling cameras, the jump-cuts and clutter, the music, the thrum.