Hamlet 2

Andrew Fleming, USA, 2008
3.5 out of 4 stars

I really loved this film, even if it made me cringe at times, but I definitely think there’s a possibility that I’m giving the filmmakers too much credit for sophistication. It doesn’t help that, when I heard about the concept, I immediately wanted it to be great or at least good, as it just seemed like something too good to squander. It was this that caused me to overlook the mixed reviews and go see the thing in theaters.

It’s indisputable that some level of “meta” is going on in Hamlet 2, as it opens with Dana Marschz, a drama teacher played by Steve Coogan, mouthing the words to a staging of his own “adaptation” of Erin Brockovich (which, in itself, shows how easy it is to take the piss out of "earnest" films just by repeating them with less conviction and skill). Yes, his eventual decision to create the play after which the entire film is named is actually a step forward in originality for this guy, and when he is confronted with an influx of “troubled” (or are they?) Latino students in his drama class, he reaches into that same category for reference to “classics” of middlebrow underdog uplift, especially Dangerous Minds. His students, of course, initially waver between disinterest and mockery.

Most of the film, then, consists of Coogan acting pathetic in almost every way possible, but Dana is not exactly deluded, which is what I’m used to in this “zany” sad sack portrayals. The most important part, for me, is that Coogan and the filmmakers make the effort to actually extract jokes from this patheticness, rather than just merely reveling his lameness and trolling for unearned laughs, as so many “lowbrow” comedies do nowadays.

Where the film gets more complicated, and where I start to become more uncertain about what’s really going on, is when the inevitable staging of the “sequel” play occurs. It’s certainly entertaining in a perverse way, but it finally concludes with a brief sequence almost devoid of laughter; I have my theories as to why it happened, but it’s here that I may have especially been over-interpreting. The way I see it, either they were making a very clever move near the end there, or they eventually got lazy (or went soft) with their subject matter. Honestly, I’m not even sure if it’s a satire. I guess you can see why it got mixed reviews, right? It may be worth a look for you, but it’s probably a better bet for DVD, where I’m sure most will see it as it becomes a cult classic.

Source: Universal 35mm print
9 Sep, 1:00 PM