I've read Othello a number of times. I've seen several cinematic adaptations. And I've seen the play performed a half dozen times, including a fabulous Royal Shakespeare Company production in London. In all my experiences with the text, I've never found the tragic conclusion quite so, well, funny.

Now don't get me wrong, murders and suicides and other horrible things aren't funny. But when a film handles such powerful and sensitive material so badly, it's hard not to chuckle. For my money, Othello is Shakespeare's most gut-wrenching tragedy. The play is all inexorable, inevitable, unstoppable horror and it never lets up. Even Hamlet throws in humorous characters and subplots in order to delay gratification until the finale, but Othello just rushes ahead. And botching that kind of amazing storytelling is just a crime and director Timothy Blake Nelson and writer Brad Kaaya are the guilty parties.

Our former Moor general Othello has now become a scrawny high school basketball player named Odin (Mekhi Phifer, who gets further every day from his nifty debut performance in Clockers) . Odin is the only African-American at a Southern prep school and the film makes it clearly early on that as-per-convention, he has a checkered past and the only reason he's being tolerated at his new school is because he can lead the basketball team to glory. His coach (Martin Sheen, spraying spittle all around) respects his skills so much that he names "O" his team's MVP and says that "O" is like a son to him. This annoys the coach's actual son, Hugo (Josh Hartnett in one-note sulking/skulking mode) who pretends to be Odin's friends, but has other plans for him. More truthful in her affections is Desi (Julia Stiles in her third different Shakespeare adaptation), the lily-white daughter of the school's dean. But before you start getting too attached to anybody, you should be warned that, well, bad things are going to happen. Horribly awkward and bad things.

I'm actually not uncomfortable with the transposition of the story to modern times. The updating is all reductive and minimizing, but that's sortta OK, even if it does make the conclusion feel like overkill (obviously links to Columbine aside, the film's justifications for high school violence may be superficially interesting, but they don't go very deep). The major problem is that as director, Nelson refuses to let the story tell itself. It's like he doesn't trust the material. And I think Mr. T said it best when he said, "I pity the fool who doesn't trust Shakespeare." Or at least that's what Mr. T. might have said if he had been in the film.

Nelson can't seem to imagine that the basic story has enough gravitas, so he keeps amping up the emotions in the most heavy-handed manner imaginable. Odin's breaking point scene, in which he tears down a backboard during a dunk competition is nothing short of riotous. It's badly staged, badly edited, and generally ill-imagined. And when "O" turns the crowd against him by pushing a little boy, you wonder why Nelson didn't have him spit on an elderly woman and kick a dog. It's downright operatic. Nelson also blows it by using stylized flash-forwards to illustrate Hugo's plot before it occurs. This numbs the effects of everything that comes afterwards. There's no build to anything and as I said earlier, removing the pervasive fatalism of Othello takes actual skill.

The dialogue is painful to listen to, particularly when Hugo and Odin converse in an early 90s version of ebonics. I think some of that may have been intentional, but were the romantic scenes between Odin and Desi also supposed to be groan-worthy? The fact that none of the actors are able to transcend the clunky speeches is just an additional pity. Stiles and Hartnett are one-note and Phifer just isn't up to carrying this film. All three are decent actors, but this just isn't their day. The middle aged supporting actors like Martin Sheen and John Heard overact, and the younger supporting actors (like Andrew Keegan and Elden Henson) aren't up to this level of drama at all.

That Brad Kaaya couldn't top Shakespeare is one thing, that his writing has all the racial currency of Breakin' 2 is something else. Basically, the script and direction fall into every imaginable racial stereotype. Odin is all about ballin', he slips into the drug game, every time he moves the rap on the soundtrack becomes overwhelming, and the general paranoia of black men raping white women gets its ten minutes in the sun. Shakespeare handled the racial issues with style, Nelson and Kaaya prefer to bash the audience over the head with them. And every dramatic Shakespearean trope that works well on stage — like the scarf/hankerchief that sets much of the tragedy in motion — fails on screen. Just about everything feels like it was a good idea at the time, but in reality, nothing works.

So many bad ideas: Hugo with the doves/pigeons. That's a bad idea. Hugo's book-ending voice-overs. They're a bad idea. The scenes with the drug dealer are all bad ideas. Etc.

Anybody can make a dull movie, but I'm convinced that some talent is required to botch a film this badly. If I felt like "O" was likely to encourage teens to go back and read their Shakespeare, I'd almost recommend this movie. But I suspect that instead, the film will just be a proxy for The Bard. And that's just sad.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age