Thursday, September 04, 2008
Movie Review: Hamlet 2
I was quite disappointed with this film. I fully expected from the trailers that it would be a hilarious if vulgar comedy. It turned out to have all the qualities of one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that goes on too long. At an hour and a half long, this movie was pretty much exactly one hour too long.
The premise, I expect, is well known: a high school drama department, facing extinction, makes a last ditch effort to gain an audience by staging a campy, offensive, outrageous musical sequel to Hamlet - quite a trick considering that almost all of the characters are dead by the end of the first play.
The sequel, which involves Hamlet stealing Albert Einstein's time machine and recruiting Jesus Christ and Hillary Clinton to help him prevent all the tragic events of the first play, is in fact very funny. I still have the centrepiece tune, "Rock Me Sexy Jesus", stuck in my head. ("Immaculate conception really makes my day; But the dude's got lats that make me feel gay.") I would pay big money Broadway ticket prices to see a full length version of the play.
Unfortunately, the movie spends only the last half-hour on the play itself. The remainder of the film is spent on the build-up - a tiresome, cliche-ridden classroom drama so boring as to defy description.
In the first 2/3 of the movie, I smiled (not laughed, smiled) only twice. The first time was when the main character, a pretentious frustrated actor cum drama teacher (Steve Coogan) faced down his arch nemesis, the theatre critic - a 12 year old boy who writes reviews for the school newspaper.
The second time was when the movie reached that ever-so-predictable crossroads common to all classroom dramas: the teacher, facing backlash at home and from the community, is about to give up but the students step up to assure him that he is needed and has changed their lives; as cliched as that scene was, I loved how the students described the teacher's accomplishment: "You showed us that it doesn't matter how much talent we lack, as long as we have enthusiasm!"
But that's it. That's all the funnies for the first hour. Director Andrew Fleming seems to have thought that endless scenes of Coogan flailing about on rollerskates and generally acting awkward were somehow uproariously funny, but they really aren't
My advice: wait until this comes out on DVD, then scene-select to the beginning of the play. You won't miss a thing.
posted by Mentok @ 12:16 p.m.,
2 Comments:
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At 6:05 p.m.,
Natsthename said...
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I will save myself the dough, even though I wanted to see this one. Thanks for saving me money!!
But I just love Amy Poehler. She and Tina Fey let me down with Baby Mama, too. -
At 9:48 p.m.,
cchang said...
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But, "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is so sing-a-long-able! Aww man! I wanted to see Hamlet 2. :( Well...I appreciate the write up Mentok. Always a good film critic, you are!
