What did you think of "Titus"?   Good 68% 51   Bad 15% 11   Somewhere in between 9% 7   Haven't seen it 8% 6 Total Votes   75

Grade: C+

Verdict: A stylish but empty version of Shakespeare's gory potboiler.

Details: Starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Rated R for strong violent and sexual images. 2 hours, 42 minutes.

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Review: "The goddess of justice has left the earth," cries Anthony Hopkins as the titular Roman general in "Titus." After a nonstop series of decapitations and rapes, severed limbs and torn-out tongues, he's kind of stating the obvious. As the movie stretches toward the three-hour mark, you wish he'd just get on with it and take revenge on his bloody enemies.

Set in a mythic No-Time and filled with fascist imagery (like the Ian McKellen "Richard III" five years ago), this adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" by stage whiz Julie Taymor ("The Lion King") doesn't lack style. If anything, it has too much, what with its crumbling ruins, vintage convertibles, Fellini-esque orgies and psychedelic, MTV-style montages of prowling tigers and busted statuary. It received an Oscar nomination for its costumes. What it doesn't have is a core.

Hopkins plays a warrior whose main flaw is blind loyalty to his country. Returning in triumph from battle bearing the captive Goth queen Tamora (a body-tattooed Jessica Lange) and her sybaritic sons, he's called upon by the people to replace the newly deceased emperor. Instead, he endorses Caesar's son, the oily Saturninus (Alan Cumming, whose fey, eye-shadowed shtick is getting a little stale). When Saturninus claims Titus' daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser) as his bride, the general gives his blessing — though Lavinia is in love with his brother Bassianus (James Frain). Titus even kills his own youngest son for challenging the match.

Never mind. Saturninus decides to marry Tamora instead. And she, with the help of her Moorish slave and sometime lover Aaron (Harry Lennix), plots to get even with Titus for the killing of her eldest son, a sacrificial victim of the war.

Hang on, people; it gets even more complicated. That has always been the weakness of "Titus Andronicus": It's all plot twists and shock tactics, without the poetry and resonance of Shakespeare's later work. Taymor doesn't do anything to fill in the blanks or convince us that there's some deeper meaning here. She's more intent on finding cool catacombs to shoot in, or a ghostly, de Chirico-like high-rise to serve as the Roman court.

She can't make sense of the play's bizarre, even desperate shifts of tone. There's an especially loony sequence in which Tamora and her spoiled, oversexed sons (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Matthew Rhys) disguise themselves as Revenge, Rapine and Murder and pay Titus a visit. She thinks the old man is losing his wits, that she can con him into luring his renegade oldest son into her trap. The setup is so preposterous (as are the costumes) that it plays like some low-comedy burlesque.

Though he's the title figure, Titus is off-screen for good chunks of the movie, as the other characters scheme, rape and lop off one another's hands. Predictably fine, Hopkins' put-upon hero is something of a hybrid of King Lear, verging on madness as his world unravels, and Hamlet, dawdling in his plans for revenge. Lange does terrific, slinky work, edging right up to campy caricature but never quite losing her steely grip. Lennix, as an early prototype of Iago, brings believable ferocity as a man relishing a chance to destroy those who've enslaved him all his life.

Good performances can't save this movie, though. When it should be tightening and galloping toward its stomach-churning final banquet, "Titus" loses its way. If nothing else, you'll come away with one valuable lesson: Never eat a tasty meat pie at your enemy's table, unless all your near and dear ones are present and accounted for.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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