The Internet Movie Database lists 48 adaptations of Macbeth, including classics by Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Akira Kurosawa, but Geoffrey Wright's contemporary gangster take on Shakespeare's Scottish play doesn’t resemble any of them as much as a low-budget remake of Brian De Palma's Scarface. There's lots of gunplay between drug dealers but very little to praise.
The contemporary updating of Shakespeare's timeless story of power and ambition is supposed to make the drama more accessible but only distracts instead. Duncan and his men are Melbourne drug lords, Macbeth’s gated estate bears a sign identifying it as Dunsinane, Banquo likes to ride motorbikes just so he can ride something when he gets whacked, and Burnham Wood turns out to be a logging company. The witches are a bunch of doped-up goth chicks who prefer a foggy dance floor to the heath.
Wright also decided to abbreviate some of the Bard’s best soliloquies in favor of extended orgies (some literal, some merely orgies of bloodletting.) In the title role, Sam Worthington gives most of his speeches in voice-over without changing his expression at all, and as Lady Macbeth, Victoria Hill looks like she would be more comfortable in a prime time soap than as literature's most cruelly ambitious woman. She gets to do "Out, out damn spot" topless.
Worst of all, the direction lacks the go-for-broke postmodern gusto that made Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet such a success: everything about this adaptation, including the slow-motion finale, feels unconvincing and lackluster, and the beauty of the language never takes wing. How could it if you cut "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" before the punchline?
