British maverick Alex Cox gives Thomas Middleton's 17th century revenge tragedy a modern makeover in the manner of Baz Luhrmann's shake-up of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.

Derek Jarman's Edward II and the crazy world of Ken Russell bubble away below the surface, too, but this is a stranger place still: a psychedelic bloodbath.

Revengers Tragedy was published anonymously in 1607, when it was deemed the dyspeptic work of a demented mind. So who better to handle this piece of jaundiced Jacobean villainy than the iconoclastic, single-minded and ever audacious Cox.

A lover of provocative film-making, the punk-spirited Cox revels in Middleton's skewed world, as old and new clash in both the story and in the style of digital presentation. Intensely intense Christopher Eccleston's crazed Vindici is the agent of change within the plot (left more or less unchanged by Cox), wreaking revenge for the wedding-day murder of his wife. Infiltrating the court of the corrupt Duke (Derek Jacobi), here re-cast as a media mogul, he curries the favour of the Duke's son, Lussurioso (Eddie Izzard, in a dandy homage to Oliver Reed), and Vindici will be vindicated.

While Cox's mad biopic of Sid And Nancy collides with Jacobean gore in a Scouse setting of facial piercing and body art, Frank Cottrell Boyce takes literacy licence to the gleeful, limit in a volley of industrial abuse.

Making a virtue of its paltry budget, Cox's mini-epic is typically flawed and muddled and hit-and-miss, rebellious and excessive. A Jacobean joy-ride.

Updated: 08:56 Friday, February 28, 2003