"Men of Respect" plays out the story of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" in a modern-day New York gangster setting. The mix is as oil with water.
What writer-director William Reilly is aiming for has some value, but his execution leaves muchto be desired. Though the letter of the Bard has been faithfully adapted, with set-pieces and variations on dialogue inventively conceived, the spirit has been lost by overplaying atmosphere — darkness, thunder and lightning, even an earthquake — and punctuating speeches with gunfire and gore.
John Turturro, who was in two mob movies last year, "Miller's Crossing" and "State of Grace," is the Macbeth here, a small-time hood who moves to the center of the "family" by killing his enemies, egged on by his wife (Katherine Borowitz, Turturro's real-life wife).
But students of "Macbeth" — and maybe everyone else, too — will find unintended humor in certain scenes. At one point he goes around shouting that he can't be killed because those around him "are not of woman born." In the background one of his cohorts says, "What does that mean?"
Maybe Reilly should have aimed for comedy. Certainly when Steven Wright, the deadpan standup comic, turns up in a cameo, one wonders if that isn't what he meant to do.
"Men of Respect" is rated R for considerable violence and profanity, and some nudity.