D: Alex Cox. S: Frank Cottrell Boyce. Play: Thomas Middleton. P: Tod Davies, Margaret Matheson. Cast: Christopher Eccleston, Eddie Izzard, Marc Warren, Derek Jacobi, Diana Quick, Anthony Booth. UK dist (DVD): Palisades Tartan.

Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy, a modern-dress adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Elizabethan slaughterthon, is a would-be satire of Millenial England overloaded with this erratic director’s typical grab-bag of pop-cultural excess. Julie Taymor’s brilliant Titus (1999) showed how this sort of thing should be done; Cox shows us how it shouldn’t. Suffering from an ugly fusion of styles chiefly influenced by Ken Russell’s Lisztomania and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, and made on an obvious shoestring on the rubbish-strewn streets of Liverpool, it’s hard to believe this could be anybody’s idea of rewarding entertainment.

Christopher Eccleston does his best to hold this mess together as the borderline-insane revenger of the title, but Eddie Izzard makes a terribly weak and unconvincing villain. A chaotic lack of focus pretty much wrecks Revengers Tragedy from the get-go, with a superfluity of post-apocalyptic punk attitudinising and totally OTT supporting performances (Derek Jacobi as a lecherous, Karl Lagerfeld-inspired Duke is especially silly). Cox uses the film as a crude soapbox to stick his tongue out at New Labour and the Princess Di personality cult – crowbarred into an Elizabethan tragedy already overloaded with stylistic excess, it’s not hard to imagine how successfully this comes off. Chumbawumba (remember them?) supply an okay, if repetitive techno score.

A critic once dismissed Cox’s film Walker (a muddled Jarman/Peckinpah tribute decrying Reagan-era foreign policy in South America) as “Carry On Contras”; given the presence here of 70s sitcom thesp Tony Booth, and an opening scene of a coachload of cadavers rolling into town, Revengers Tragedy irresistibly suggests the alternative title “Machiavelli On The Buses”.