Weirdly, I think that is a strength of his performance. Romeo is a misunderstood character: people associate him with romance and chivalry when the Romeo from the play is obsessive, fickle, and impulsive. Kind of a dweeb, really. Juliet fails to see through his bullshit because she is so, so young.

Romeo is annoying as a character, in all fairness.

I'm sure there were people who didn't enjoy it (as can be seen in this thread haha), but even though we didn't have wikipedia to check at the time I think it was generally known to be big. And checking the stats it opened to box office #1 and then made 10x its budget, and the critics mostly liked it.

Anyway, it fortunately endures as a triumph for basically anyone who appreciates lit.

Yeah and as someone who hated Shakespeare back in my grade school days (and still does), I couldn't care less about that. I simply want to see a modern take on his plays with the script translated to a prose that I can actually understand.

As someone with ADHD, it's difficult enough as-is to focus on words on a page written in a modern dialect, let alone an ancient one! Canterbury Tales was an even worse time for me because of this. I have to be fully invested in the story, or I can't understand a damn thing in these old manuscripts because my brain refuses to pay attention to anything that isn't urgent, interesting, or novel to me.