Like a lord's great kitchen without a fire in't

Proof that all the cool people like to hang out together: The Revengers Tragedy. I read about the play, attributed to Torneur but probably written by Middleton, years ago and thought it sounded like the standard Jacobean blurdfest. How seriously can you take a play in which the characters' names include Vengeance, Chastisement, Supervacuous, Luxurious, and Spurious? It's the Jacobean equivalent of Tarantino: dark humor, massive body count, few if any sympathetic characters, and lots of madonna/whore treatments for the ladies. Not my cup of tea.

But oh, Netflix, you seductive font of information, someone's done an update and you thought I might enjoy it. Let's see, there's Alex Cox, writer/director of "Repo Man," one of my favorite movies ever to include shrimp, Harry Dean Stanton, and tiny pine-scented air fresheners, directing it as a neo-Orwellian dystopia in Liverpool. You've got the contained nuclear bomb that is Christopher Eccleston, pissed off and out for bloody revenge, with occasional breaks to play ventriloquist with his dead wife's skull. There's Derek Jacobi as the duke, looking like Karl Lagerfeld's recently disinterred twin brother, sleazing around after young women and poisoning their drinks if they're not game. The duke's crew of caddish, manipulative sons includes both Eddie Izzard and Marc Warren, known to the lucky few as Mr. Teatime the assassin from the BBC's Hogfather. All that, and Chumbawamba does the music? Give it! Give it now!

Verdict: It almost works. The acting is generally great, although Castiza and her mother are a bit weak, and Izzard in particular is a pleasant surprise. You can't say he's playing it straight, exactly, but he's more restrained than the rest of the brothers, and his scenes with Eccleston are spot on. Liverpool's combination of industrial works and ancient churches suits perfectly, and the city looks convincingly half-abandoned. The cheerfully wicked music, pop tunes for the apocalypse, burbles along merrily as everything goes to hell.

What didn't work for me was the dialogue. Paring down the original text to make room for shots makes sense, and those edits flow smoothly, but the interwoven modern lines jar too often. "Pistols! Treason! Guards! Help! My lord, the Duke, is murdered!" "No I'm not." Funny, but uneven. I felt cheated whenever contemporary lines were added; the switch from "My hairs are white, but yet my sins are green" to language without that rhythm and flow was like going from Bach to Bolton. The actors do what they can with it, with the seasoned pros managing better than most, but the shifts kept pulling me out of the story.

I'd love to hear other reactions from people who have seen this. "Shakespeare in Love" it ain't, what with the death and the vomiting of blood and the pimping out of siblings for morally dubious gain, so it was never going to get huge play, but it takes a lot of interesting risks.