The fact that Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is the shortest of the Bard’s tragedies and doesn’t skimp on the body count has guaranteed the play a big-screen makeover every few years. Like many before him, the Australian director Geoffrey Wright has chosen to stage his take on the meteoric rise and fall of the titular Scottish warlord and his ambitious wife in modern dress. And in the tradition of the 1955 British retooling, “Joe Macbeth,” and 1991’s “Men of Respect,” Mr. Wright has set his “Macbeth” in the gangster film’s criminal class.

But unlike those previous films, and more in the style of Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo & Juliet” and Julie Taymor’s “Titus,” Mr. Wright and his co-adapter, Victoria Hill, have also courageously retained Shakespeare’s dialogue.

When Macbeth (Sam Worthington) and Banquo (Steve Bastoni), two gunmen in the service of Melbourne underworld kingpin Duncan (Gary Sweet), distinguish themselves in a protracted gun battle with an Asian gang, they are hailed and praised by their kinsmen in the Bard’s English, albeit with Oz accents. When he helps himself to some captured psychedelics, Macbeth is in turn hailed as the Thane of Cawdor by three mysterious sisters in the smoke machine fog and dance-track thump of a nightclub dance floor. To celebrate Macbeth’s subsequent promotion to head of said nightclub (called “Cawdor,” naturally) Duncan and his son, Malcolm (Matt Doran; Donalbain, the second son from the play, didn’t survive this adaptation, apparently), Banquo, and some colleagues join Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth (Ms. Hill) for a sybaritic weekend in the Macbeths’ pleasure palace estate, Dunsinane. But Mrs. M. can’t leave well enough alone. Her husband is just a few heartbeats away from taking over Duncan’s rackets and the glass ceiling preventing his rise can be removed with a few lethal knife strokes. Several iambic pentameter pep talks later, Macbeth creeps into the guest house where Duncan sleeps and does the first fateful deed.

The bulk of the film, like the bulk of the play, documents Macbeth’s brief ascendancy to boss of bosses, accompanied by more dispatched rivals, further visits from the “weird sisters,” and the unraveling of his wife’s sanity. Unfortunately, Mr. Wright’s retelling is maddeningly short on the sort of representational details that might make the film’s Hong Kong cinema-influenced crime milieu work.

The Melbourne criminal enterprise that Macbeth would rule appears to have grown out of a male modeling agency. What little we see of these crooks’ lives involves posing with guns, doing drugs, and eating in Japanese restaurants. Any criminal code to which they may subscribe takes a backseat to their dress code.

Not trusting in the Bard’s character design, Mr. Wright and Ms. Hill generously offer the back story invention of a dead son to foment or excuse the Macbeth’s thirst for blood. The film opens on the couple visiting their child’s grave, and Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness starts when she sees television news footage of Macduff’s assassinated family carried out to the meat wagon.

Macbeth and his Lady are so firmly ensconced in velvet-draped, hollow-cheeked splendor at home at Dunsinane that in some scenes the film appears to be a Shakespeare adaptation set among rock stars, not gangsters. It doesn’t help that Shakespeare’s witches look and act like groupies. Their famous Act IV “bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” encounter with Macbeth here climaxes, as it were, in a four-way sex scene.

Everyone involved tries to recite Shakespeare’s words like they mean something, but the Bard’s language provides more character-obscuring haze than story-focusing clarity. Mr. Worthington never successfully strikes a balance among Macbeth’s ambition, deeds, and fate. A late film jig that Macbeth dances in the face of imminent death seems less like a product of a villain’s hubris than an actor’s desperation.

In spite of copious muzzle flashes and blood squibs, Mr. Wright’s “Macbeth” is a curiously inert and anemic affair. Burnham Wood arrives at Dunsinane via a heavily armed, high-balling 18-wheeler, and Macbeth exhorts Macduff to “lay on” whilst clad in a leather kilt and carrying a sub-machine gun. Even still, the film isn’t so much cursed by overkill as it is hobbled by under-life.