Amy Acker in a scene from Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare is endlessly adaptable, his stories capable of being transformed into gangster films (Joe Macbeth), post-war German melodrama (The Rest is Silence, based on Hamlet) or Japanese epics (Throne of Blood from Macbeth, Ran from King Lear). It's one thing to take a basic plot and reinvent it in another time and place, but it's tricker to retain the original text, which is what Whedon has attempted in Much Ado About Nothing. I confess I have mixed feelings about this sort of exercise; it can work brilliantly with the dramas -- Richard Loncraine's updating of Richard III to the 1930s was masterly -- but I'm not so certain it works with the comedies. Not with this comedy, at least. It's not just that phrases such as "by my troth" sound rather ridiculous when spoken by American actors in a contemporary setting, but key plot elements -- such as Claudio's horror to discover that Hero, his bride-to-be, is not a virgin -- just don't work in this setting. It would have taken a dramatic genius to make this sort of thing convincing and, whatever Whedon may be, he's not that. His use of television actors doesn't always pay off either. The men seem at times uncomfortable with their lines, and the physical comedy -- Benedick (Alexis Denisof) in the garden trying to overhear a conversation going on inside the house -- is often clumsy. The women fare better; Amy Acker is a delightful Beatrice, whose early contempt for Benedick gives way convincingly to love -- on her terms. Jillian Morgese is a charming Hero, though her reaction to the slander involving her virginity is, like many elements in the film, overdone. Whedon has fun with the comic cops, led by Nathan Fillion's Dogberry, but again, in these scenes his touch is far from light. The film is photographed attractively in black and white by Jay Hunter and starts promisingly with a silent sequence in which Benedick leaves Beatrice's bed early one morning after what was presumably a one-night stand. This addition to Shakespeare goes some way to explaining why Beatrice is so hostile towards Benedick but it also makes a nonsense of the shock-horror revelation involving Hero's chastity. The last time I remember enjoying an updating of a Shakespeare comedy, retaining much of the original text, for the cinema screen was Kenneth Branagh's little-seen Love's Labours Lost (2000), which was augmented with Cole Porter songs; seven years earlier, Branagh had directed, in period, what now seems the definitive screen version of Much Ado About Nothing. Whedon's version is a good try, no more. Much Ado About Nothing (M) 3 stars Limited release