HAMLET 2, 2008
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HAMLET 2
Movie Review
Directed by Andrew Fleming
Starring Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener
Review by Eli Manning

SYNOPSIS:

In this irreverent comedy, a failed actor-turned-worse-high-school-drama-teacher rallies his Tucson, AZ students as he conceives and stages politically incorrect musical sequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

REVIEW:

For someone who's been inside of the film industry for this decade, you can't help but wonder where all the actors go. There is so many of them with so few roles and eventually most of them will quit or force to quit in order to survive. Hamlet 2 tells the story of where some of the actors go. When they don't let you do, you have to teach.

Tuscan, Arizona is the perfect setting for this movie because this is a place that you should never end up at. It's the place you leave early on and never come back!

Steve Coogan plays Dana Marschz, a wannabe actor his whole life. He's now teaching drama at a public school in Tuscan, getting his only two students to perform plays from popular Hollywood movies. Dana is a man who just wants to be happy but everything he does gets him dumped on by the world. And there's a good reason for that. He does the wrong things.

Dana is like many actors I know and Coogan plays him brilliantly. He's an actor who is more in awe of being an actor than actually working hard to be an actor. He's obsessed with the great Hollywood stars and rather talk about their careers than set up his own. He's 99% of wannabe artists where he rather consume the product than create the product. Hence why he ends up in Tuscan teaching.

Of course this is a movie and the main characters needs to get over this block and create something for the world. He ends up writing Hamlet 2, a therapy piece for him as it's essentially about getting over his issues with his father.

The best part of this film is ACT 5 (they made this film in typical theater fashion with 5 acts) when the play actually occurs and we get to see the brilliance of this insane play. It's too bad that the play wasn't the actual movie itself, but that wouldn't be your comedy film of today where we see our comedic main character overcome their fears and succeed in the end.

Hamlet 2 is a must see film for any actor out there. This is your future if you don't step up and just wait for your agent to call you for an audition. Your dreams will get shattered and you will end up in a dead end. But you can always write Romeo and Juliet 2: Back from the Dead to get you out of the funk.

I can't recommend this film for the rest of the world because there are just too many problems with it. Hamlet 2 plays it safe and resorts to the Hollywood formula. And you have to wonder why because this is a low budget film and not much of an investment for the studios. So director/writer Andrew Fleming should of just gone full out and showed us something insane, just like the title of this piece.

Also, Fleming didn't do what he usually does best and give us unique and special high school characters (Nancy Drew, Dick, The Craft) who are misfits but don't care that they are. In Hamlet 2 we really don't get to know any of kids as this is entirely Coogan's story. It's too bad too because these are the people who will perform the play and in order for us to care at the end, we must care about these kids.

At the end of this screening I felt a bit cheated because the concept was so much better than the execution. This creative team had more in them and I wonder why they didn't just go all the way, like the main character does in the film. Were they scared of an R rating? Did they rush the film before another rewrite was needed? Who knows, but it's too bad because this film won't succeed at the box office because Hamlet 2 in many ways is just a poor man's version of Tropic Thunder.

2 stars out of 4!

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