Sometimes, after seeing a movie, I'll go onto its IMDb page and see what other people thought about it. And with Coriolanus, a lot of the discussion was about "ye olde" English language. This didn't surprise me, because it is a rather common complaint about movies adapted from Shakespeare. For some reason, however, the complaints about Coriolanus struck a nerve. Most likely it was due to the inanity of some of them. The language was too out of place in the action scenes; the language made the film too difficult to follow; who the hell talks like that? One poster actually suggested that the movie's dialogue should have been "modern", but that the Coriolanus character would like to quote Shakespeare, which, if you realize that Coriolanus, in a movie titled Coriolanus, would be "quoting" lines given by a character also named Coriolanus, from a Shakespearean play also named Coriolanus, is something bizarrely meta.
I sympathize with people who have difficulty understanding Shakespeare. Watching a play of his, or a movie based on a play, can be very demanding on one's attention and interpretive ability. But criticizing an adaptation of Shakespeare for containing Shakespearean language betrays a certain callowness.
I am not an expert on Shakespeare. I have only read around a third of his plays. By no means do I think everything he wrote was a masterpiece. In fact, some of his plays are outright bad. (I'm looking at you, Two Gentlemen of Verona...) Sympathy aside, however, I have to make the following point boldly (and I mean that literally):
You cannot separate Shakespeare's words from his works.
Shakespeare wrote plays. If you are trying to adapt a Shakespearean play into a movie, and maintain a sense of it still being Shakespeare, it makes no sense to gut the language. Oh, you might (and probably should) abridge the play, or maybe alter some lines to make them easier to understand, but, if you do it right, the lyrical and metric qualities of the play's language will remain largely intact, and your adaptation will be suitably Shakespearean.
In an aside to this (suitable for a discussion on Shakespeare), there is something that may not be all that realized by the lay consumer of Shakespeare (if such a thing exists): many of his plays are derived from stories and plays previously written or recorded by other people. So, unless an adaptation is of one of his few wholly original works, it could conceivably be argued that it would be just as much an adaptation of the source material Shakespeare used.
There have been numerous adaptations of Shakespeare that have discarded his use of language. The musicals West Side Story and Kiss Me, Kate obviously discard his words and significantly alter the plays (Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, respectively) in order to make the transition to the stage musical medium. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think everyone would agree with me that neither musical can be called Shakespeare. Likewise, to counter the bizarrely meta suggestion mentioned above, 10 Things I Hate About You, also a modernized adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, would hardly be Shakespearean even if Patrick Verona quoted Petruchio. In fact, it would be a bit odd.
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You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all cates: and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation;
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