Kelly Wand"Hamlet 2" review
September 12th 2008 14:09
Will Hamlet 3 break the streak?
Better than the original*!
Hamlet 2 is a comedy about a bad musical put on by amateurs à la Waiting for Guffman, only unlike Guffman you don’t get to sample much of the actual play, and what little is onscreen appears far too well choreographed and sung to have been conjured into being by the characters that we’ve spent the movie with. It’s kind of like how at the end of the first “Bill and Ted” movie, Bill and Ted’s crappiness as musicians served as the final punchline, but somehow by the end of the sequel, they’ve become genuinely talented artists, because they’d “practiced” and had kids, the two secret methods to flawless composition (and the crowd cheers wildly even though their song is bland). Likewise, there’s nothing we’re shown in Hamlet 2 for 90 minutes about Steve Coogan’s (the director from Tropic Thunder) failed actor/playwright/drama teacher character to suggest that he has the slightest inkling of talent (or a musical bent) until the play starts and Hamlet the character doesn’t even seem to be the play's subject.
Great title notwithstanding, and although I enjoyed the movie more than this review makes it sound, Hamlet 2 isn’t quite as funny as it thinks it is. It doesn’t have a single belly-laugh moment, and it’s too defiantly laid-back to be brilliant -- but it's pleasant. And the endearing performance of Steve Coogan’s lovable loser at its brain-frizzed center counts for a lot. Like many great artists throughout human history, Coogan’s Dana Marschz is obsessive, oblivious, pathetic, and desperate for critical approval; he feverishly yearns for a positive review from a 10-year-old film critic and to be an “inspirational” teacher to his mostly sullen students in the manner of the professors from Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, and Mr. Holland’s Opus (he seems only able to reference movies from the ‘90’s). His efforts to inspire them include accidentally braining his meekest female student in the face with a wastebasket and wearing a sheet to work, which he openly admits is intended, at his wife’s behest, to warm his semen. He’s inexplicably married to the unsatisfied Catherine Keener, playing an extension of her Being John Malkovich bitch-queen, but fortunately for him she runs off with a boarder they’ve taken in out of financial desperation (David Arquette, who still says roughly two words too many). This frees him up to court sexy Eliabeth Shue, who plays herself as a disenchanted actress working as a receptionist/nurse at an Arizona gynecologist’s (he flirts by saying things to her like, “Shoo, Shue!” and tripping over his roller skates). I confess a certain hardwired emotional weakness for fearless characters like Dana Marschz, childlike rubes who refuse to give up on their idiotic dreams in the face of repeated catastrophe and don’t seem to mind being the object of universal mockery. But the movie he’s in isn’t as good as Coogan or his play. There’s a skeletal plot; the high school principal loathes Dana and tries every means he can to shut down the production but in the end winds up being moved by it. Amy Poehler plays a fatuous anti-Semitic ACLU attorney who gets comically trampled to death. Once the play starts, the movie’s humor gets sort of maudlin and late-John Waters-y (a Jesus freak has an epiphany during its catchiest musical number, “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” that’s played eerily straight).
Much as I preferred the buggier rhythms and deliberate emptiness of the movie’s first half (having just returned from Arizona myself, I identified with the characters’ heat-crazed restlessness), by the end I sort of wished screenwriter Pam Brady (who was likely smoking better weed when she penned Team America) and director Andrew Fleming (who was likely smoking pole when he directed Nancy Drew and the ugly Baldwin brother in Threesome) had gone the Noises Off route and let Dana’s play run uninterrupted so we could appreciate for ourselves just what all the trampling was about.
*The Mel Gibson one.
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