Review: Hamlet 2 (2008)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                             HAMLET 2
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Awkwardly written and borrowing heavily
     from other comedic films, this film is about an
     actor/playwright/teacher who is not particularly
     good at anything he does.  Then he puts together
     a play involving Hamlet and Jesus in a time
     machine and discovers he is good at causing an
     uproar.  There is a germ of a good idea here, but
     only a germ.  The film is trying to go in too
     many different directions at once.  It is just a
     thin storyline on which the writer has hung too
     many unfunny jokes.  Andrew Fleming directs and
     co-writes.  Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10

Humor is very subjective and some other viewers might find the
film much more funny.  HAMLET 2 is a tribute to some of the
funniest moments in cinema.  One can see in it bits from
TOOTSIE, Woody Allen's early comedies, THE PRODUCERS, and
Inspector Clouseau.  However, rarely have all these bits been
borrowed to less effect.  Perhaps because the bits are all so
familiar, they needed an extra twist for them to have some
punch.  Instead they are poorly delivered with little comic
timing.  The central plot could have been developed, but was
instead just an outline and gags were glommed onto it wherever
the writers could think of them.  A Peter Sellers has the
right timing and the right false-dignity so that when he
catches his hand in a door it is funny (at least sometimes).
But when Steve Coogan tries to imitate the same stunt his
timing and his attitude is wrong and the joke comes off tired.
Thrown gratuitously into a scene it does not have the same
snap.  On the other hand a teen audience might find some of
the humor a little less stale.  Most of the wit of a comedy
should arise from character.  Here more comes from the
circumstance, with characters left undeveloped.

Steve Coogan plays Dana Marschz, a failed actor, a failing
drama teacher, and a miserable playwright.  He in not sure how
to teach acting and inspire his disinterested class, how to
convince the school board to not cut the drama program, or how
to write an original play.  He is even not sure how to
pronounce his own last name.  Marschz seems to have little to
offer his classes beside platitudes that for him are deeply
felt, but seem really irrelevant to his students. In this
Arizona school there has been a big influx of uninterested
Latino students.  One of them pointedly is not portrayed as a
typical Latino tough guy, but the script treats most of the
rest of the class very superficially and stereotypically.  In
most teaching movies the students are well characterized.
They are, after all, the most important part of the classroom.
Here most of the students are merely props.  They are not
developed at all.

Marschz's drama classes do an annual play, till now always a
near-transcription of a blockbuster movie.  The teaching of
drama is being dropped from the school curriculum.  Dana's
last play is an original story, "Hamlet 2" in which the Prince
of Denmark escapes death and together with Jesus takes a time
machine back in time to save all the characters whom William
Shakespeare had die in his play.  The vulgar language of the
play and the use of Jesus has polarized the Tucson, Arizona,
community between people who object to his treatment of Jesus
and those who defend artistic freedom.  Meanwhile Marschz is
having personal problems.  He is having a less personal
relationship with his wife (Catherine Keener) and a more
personal relationship with alcohol.  Which all goes to make
the story seem deeper than it really is.  The plot has several
lapses in logic.  Somehow his class manages to put on a play
with Broadway style production values, though the effort to
get it so is never really shown.  Bits of the musical play
within the story are good.  Sadly we see even less of the play
"Hamlet 2" than Mel Brooks shows us of his "Springtime for
Hitler".

Steve Coogan has a long history of British comedy particularly
for playing his alter-ego, the smug, venal, and superficial
radio and TV personality Alan Partridge.  In American comedy
he does not have the same resonance.  I rate it a 0 on the -4
to +4 scale or 4/10.  There are several pieces of vulgar
language in the film that some viewers might find
objectionable.  I found them neither objectionable nor
particularly funny.  In fact, that sums up how I felt about
the entire film.

Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1104733/

					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper