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This comedy doth protest too much, methinks
“Hamlet 2” hits and misses
By Alex Rewey
“Sadly, as offensive as many of the characters seem to perceive Marschz’s opus, it ultimately doesn’t quite venture into intelligent satire the likes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, instead settling for gross-out gags and mildly sacrilegious characterization.”
Even by Hollywood’s increasingly lowered standards, William Shakespeare’s masterpiece “Hamlet” stands as hallowed literary ground. How can you possibly best one of the greatest works of the English language? Let alone one that kills nearly all of its main characters? It would surely take a creative mind of the ultimate caliber, or the most brazen of desperate washouts...
Fresh from his stint as “Tropic Thunder’s” tragically misguided director, British comedian Steve Coogan plays failed actor turned Tucson high school drama coach Dana Marschz. Despite a career comprised mostly of awkwardly funny commercial testimonials, including a hilariously convincing turn as genital herpes patient, Marschz nevertheless harbors the over the top eccentricities of the most disassociated of Hollywood A-listers.
True to cinematic form, Coogan helms a reluctant class of unlikely urban thespians, who in the face of program cancellation, attempt to pull together for one last curriculum saving show. The kicker is: this time around, in place of the usual noble, feel-good tear jerker is Marschz’s spitefully offensive meta-sequel, the conceptually bombastic “Hamlet 2.”
For the most part, Coogan plays the production’s troubled skipper with a humorlessly blissful ignorance. As much of the film’s humor draws on the eye-rolling melodrama of after school specials, Marschz typically delights in portraying himself as the noble educator tasked with reaching today’s “jaded youth.” Yet, for as much as the film attempts to break with some of those conventions, like Marschz’s realization that his token badboy is valedictorian material with an early acceptance to Brown, it doesn’t quite fully transcend some of the genre’s cheesiness.
Occasionally supporting Marschz’s efforts from the flanks are his seriously neglected and alienated alcoholic wife Brie, played with a curious morbidity by Catherine Keener (“The 40 Year Old Virgin). In contrast, Marschz finds an unlikely mentor in real life actress Elisabeth Shue, who having given up acting, has resurfaced as a Tucson fertility clinic nurse.
“Saturday Night Live” vet Amy Poehler delivers a hilarious, yet underutilized role as an enthusiastically quirky and unsentimental ACLU representative tasked with defending Marschz’s production from censorship with the ulterior motive of increased personal exposure. Though her role strongly echoes some of SNL’s excessively cartoonish sketches, it still would have been nice to see her in more than just her handful of trailer sound bites instead of the film’s annoyingly continued return to the punch line of Marschz’s inability to stand up on roller skates.
Not surprisingly perhaps, the actual scenes of the production of “Hamlet 2” comprise some of the film’s funniest moments, like the compulsively catchy musical number, “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” in ode to the man himself, who is written into the plays as a sort of hip, contemporary Obi-Wan to the eponymous melancholic Danish prince reinvented as a time traveling, light saber wielding action hero.
Sadly, as offensive as many of the characters seem to perceive Marschz’s opus, it ultimately doesn’t quite venture into intelligent satire the likes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, instead settling for gross-out gags and mildly sacrilegious characterization. What seemed like a potentially juicy opportunity for lambasting political high school censorship, or even the rationale behind unnecessary sequels, feels grossly underdeveloped or in some cases, simply unrecognized. As one of the film’s characters so aptly point out, the play’s writing is simply not that good.
Without a doubt, “Hamlet 2” garners some well-deserved laughs, yet ultimately comes off as scattered and sophomoric, perhaps better crafted from a more satirical mindset.
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