Directed by Ralph Fiennes. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain, James Nesbitt 15A cert, general release, 122 min

DRAGGING SHAKESPEARE plays to other times and other places causes greater problems on film than it does in the theatre.

A more naturalistic medium, cinema tends to shudder at the joints when Elizabethan verse emerges from the mouths of 19th-century cowboys or 23rd-century spacemen. (Baz Luhrmann's super-heightened Romeo + Julietis one of the few to pull it off.)

With this in mind, we should not be surprised to discover that the least successful aspect of Ralph Fiennes's enjoyable take on Coriolanusis its relocation to war-torn former Yugoslavia. The Roman tragedy does deal with a class of civil disturbance, so the surroundings are not entirely inappropriate. But too often the demands of the conceit render the action just a bit ridiculous. The least said about Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow's uneasy contributions, the soonest dispatched to the vault of forgotten follies.

The baggy play has, however, been brilliantly edited into a taut drama of war, exile and revenge. Fiennes stars as Caius Martius who, following victory against the Volscians, is honoured with the title Coriolanus. He is propelled towards political office but, like a more violent Gordon Brown, proves unwilling or unable to make pretty noises to the great unwashed. Suffering expulsion, he forms an uneasy alliance with Aufidius (Gerard Butler), his former enemy.

Shot in a post-martial haze by Barry Ackroyd, Coriolanuscommunicates the annoying fuss and clutter that poisons political life. Middle-aged men are forever gathering in gossipy huddles to obfuscate their way through imagined crises. But the film works best at an emotional level.

Vanessa Redgrave, both fragile and indomitable, is superb as the hero’s manipulative mother. Jessica Chastain, playing Coriolanus’s wife, speaks the verse sweetly. The most surprising performance, however, comes from Butler. Who’d have thought the Scotsman would be so effective at waving a weapon in the air while bellowing furiously? Okay, almost everybody. Still, Butler’s turn offers an impressive variation on his stock persona.

Few adaptations of notorious problem plays have been quite so viscerally entertaining.