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Delayed in the wake of the Colombine massacre, this bold reworking of "Othello" gets a UK release more than two years after its completion.
One would like to say the wait has been worth it, but "O" remains a fairly minor entry in the recent craze of updating Shakespeare's works.
Set in an elite private school in the American South, "O" revolves around Odin (Phifer), the only black student and the school's most gifted basketball player.
Odin has it all: he's popular, he's being scouted by the NBA, and he's dating the Dean's daughter, Desi (Stiles).
What Odin doesn't know is that best pal Hugo (Hartnett) is bitterly envious and is plotting to bring about his destruction.
Unlike Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet", "O" replaces the Bard's verse with pungent modern jargon.
"You ever lie on me again, I'll f*** your punk ass up!" Odin says in one of his more poetic moments, while Hugo's response to whether he's read any of Shakespeare's plays is: "I thought he wrote movies!".
Such post-modernisms may help to make the drama more accessible to a young audience. But they also serve to render the tragic climax less affecting and, alas, slightly comic.
Stiles makes a fetching fist of the Desdemona role, while Phifer offers a muscular and dynamic Othello.
The main disappointment, however, is Hartnett, whose Hugo/Iago is not so much a Machiavellian schemer as a whining brat who doesn't get enough love from Daddy (Sheen). Somehow the Bard was above such petty motivations.
