Before I rip this movie to shreds, I want to start by making it clear how much I love musicals, particularly movie musicals. I’ll judge a stage musical with different criteria than a movie musical, but one thing is consistent, I am an easy sell when it comes to the musical genre as a whole. A movie musical can get almost everything wrong about the stage musical it was adapted from (recent examples include Mean Girls and Dear Evan Hansen) and I will still find something to praise about what the movie has given me. But every now and then you come across a musical movie that has literally no redeeming qualities and is so poorly cast, so musically inept, so haphazardly thought out, so poorly executed and is constantly at odds with its own existence. Enter the baffling, incomprehensible world of Timothy Scott Bogart’s Juliet & Romeo.

I don’t have to explain the plot synopsis of Juliet & Romeo, do I? This is yet another adaptation of the iconic William Shakespeare play Romeo & Juliet, which has been adapted time and time again over the past several hundred years. The show’s star-crossed lovers and quirky side characters have become a staple of theatrical exhibition for the last few hundred years. And as a piece of culture, we’ve done a lot with the world of Romeo & Juliet, and I think maybe we’ve done enough. I’ve never really cared about Shakespeare, I feel for those who really have emotional attachment to this source material, and I get why they love it so much. But just in the last few years, we had the very fun jukebox Broadway musical & Juliet (more on this in a moment), we had the terrific indie drama film Ghostlight, which acutely observes the ways this generations-old play can apply to modern life and we had a very buzzy Broadway revival of Romeo & Juliet starring Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, which I did not get to see but it’s been my understanding that worked out for audiences and the creatives involved.

So why do we keep coming back to this story? What’s so fascinating about these characters that generation after generation feels compelled to come back to it? I’m not sure I have an answer for you that makes sense. It’s true that many of our iconic love stories in stage and screen have found inspiration from the Romeo & Juliet story, but as straightforward adaptations of the original story go, I think maybe we have enough of those and maybe cinema should have stuck a fork in this after Baz Luhrmann did it back in 1996. That adaptation felt modern and has verve and excitement pulsing through its veins, and in a way, Luhrmann has been chasing the dragon of that film’s success for the rest of his career. Timothy Scott Bogart’s new film certainly can’t hold a candle to all that came before it.

Our first problem is our two leading actors. Clara Rugaard, who previously played Juliet in the short-lived Shonda Rhimes series Still Star-Crossed, and Australian actor Jamie Ward, who both look like they’re in their early 30s and these characters are supposed to be teenagers. Rugaard and Ward are both very pretty people who each have individual charms of their own, but they also have no chemistry at all with each other and considering how much autotune is present in their vocals, I have no idea if these two are actually good singers or not. And without that chemistry and the urgency of this romance, this story falls flat. 

The trailer for this film promises a more starry supporting cast, with names like Jason Isaacs, Dan Fogler, Rupert Everett, Derek Jacobi and Rebel Wilson. These people are barely in the movie, and when they are they appear confused as to why they are there. And the audience is confused as well. However, like I said, we have so much autotuning going on with the vocals in these songs, nobody really has to be a singer. Even worse, the editing is so bad, the image of the actor often does not sync up with the voice of the person singing, so you often don’t know who is singing at any given time because the movie is not telling you. That’s frustrating all on its own.

The film also does all of the things that annoy me in modern musical films. The songs, written by Justin Gray and Evan Kidd Bogart, are all abysmal and dreadful. They all sound like AI-constructed top 40 pop drivel, like the songs that were even too bad for Katy Perry’s most recent album, and when the songs are a little better they sound like Pasek & Paul rejects put through an AI machine. They all kind of sound the same, they all cut back and forth between moments of character dialogue and therefore each number simultaneously feels incomplete and like it lasts forever. And the biggest crime of any musical, it does not leave you with any song you’re humming in your head on the way out the theater. And considering the desperation these songs have to recapture what audiences liked about the songs in films like The Greatest Showman, the fact that they couldn’t wring out a single memorable tune out of this schlock is kind of impressive in its own messed-up way.

Cinematographer Byron Werner’s camera cuts back and forth so haphazardly during musical numbers, we get the impression there has not been enough rehearsal time to get the choreography right. The color palette is often ugly and the shots are often under or over-lit and Luciano Capozzi’s costume design is giving Renaissance fair sponsored by Shein and Temu. And production designer Dante Ferretti, who has won THREE Academy Awards, often gives the impression the film was shot on studio backlots and the budget was very low, which I’m sure it was. But whatever they spent on this film was still too much. And like I said, the editing here is diabolical, and consistently seems at odds with what the filmmaker and actors are trying to give the viewer.

Last fall, I got to see the touring company of the very popular Broadway musical & Juliet, which is a jukebox musical featuring songs written by Max Martin, who has been responsible for some of the most iconic pop music of the past few decades. & Juliet featured the music of Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys, Demi Lovato, Pink and others, and it explodes off the stage in a very energetic way. It finds ways to modernize this source material that feel cheesy in a Mamma Mia! sort of way, but also makes a case for revisiting old stories like this with a modern lens, and also & Juliet is just a damn good time at the theater, and you can see a lot of ways where the right filmmaker could turn that into something really special on the silver screen. The thought that kept coming back to me during Juliet & Romeo was how little sense it makes to have made a pop musical about the Romeo & Juliet story and not just doing a movie of & Juliet. This show premiered on London’s West End in 2019 and then went to Broadway in 2022, where it is still playing today. It has the fanbase for a cinematic adaptation to make sense financially. Maybe the song rights are expensive, but there’s no excuse why the money that was spent on this film couldn’t have simply gone toward a properly made & Juliet adaptation. The fact that we have this film instead simply proves my theories about how we are currently living in the darkest, dumbest timeline.

So yes, as it stands, Timothy Scott Bogart’s Juliet & Romeo is an unhinged, unmitigated musical disaster that validates the incorrect opinions of all the people out there who simply don’t like musicals. And it ends with the most baffling sequel tease I have ever seen. Is this creative team just stoned out of their collective minds or do they really think they have something here? I think we have to dethrone Tom Hooper’s Cats as the most embarrassing musical film of this generation. It’s a bad day for the musical lover, but luckily I don’t see how it could possibly get any worse than this. Juliet & Romeo is the kind of legendary musical trainwreck we luckily don’t get all that often, and I can only hope this film comes and goes without anyone really noticing. Because the musical movie, particularly the original musical movie, deserves a brighter tomorrow, but at the moment, it’s not looking good out there.