In Andrzej Bartkowiak’s action thriller Romeo Must Die, Han Sing (Li) and Trish O’Day (Aaliyah) are thrown into a gang war after each of them loses a saintly brother to the other’s evil father’s henchman. There is no chemistry between Jet Li and Aaliyah among this list of star-crossed movie lovers including the animated gnomes (more on them later).
The film is notable for the fact that Angelina Jolie, then 21, plays Juliet, who is referred to as Gina and has a bad Italian accent and no discernible personality. For recognizing Shakespeare’s poetry’s great power, we can give co-directors Joseph Bologna and Renée Taylor some credit, but there is zero credit for the fact that every single punchline is a tired cliché about Italian Americans and/or horny teenagers. There is no way to forgive this unforgivably bad rom-com because it takes place in the ’90s, when the children of rival Italian caterers star in their local church’s Romeo and Juliet production and fall in love while under the spell of Shakespeare’s play. A Troma Entertainment production, this low-budget Elizabethan-inflected film from newbie screenwriter James Gunn (yes, that James Gunn) gets some points for cleverly incorporating the original text at key moments (“She doth teach the torches to burn bright ” “Parting is such sweet sorrow”) and for casting Motörhead’s Lemmy as the Chorus, but loses them all with th e th It’s too bad for Troma, but T&J comes in dead last - although that’s a compliment in this case. To say Tromeo and Juliet is a travesty of Shakespearean proportions would be an understatement.
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