HAMLET 2 violates so many of my truisms of film that I should hate it. I love it.
I don’t like dark comedy, yet this film goes very dark. I don’t like the comedy of embarrassment, yet this film puts its protagonist through an amazing amount of humiliation. I don’t like blasphemy, yet this film blasphemes so joyously that I can’t get the tune of “Rock me, sexy Jesus!” out of my mind over a week after having seen the film.
Here’s the setup: underfunded, underappreciated, and undertalented, Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) runs a threadbare theater department in a Tucson high school that couldn’t care less. Inspired by “inspirational teacher” movies and a sad obliviousness to reality as experienced by everyone else on earth, Marschz pushes on with his sorry adaptations of Hollywood films, played to unsympathetic audiences by marginally talented students. But when his program gets cancelled and all grows dark, Marschz decides to take one last chance on writing and staging his own original musical, “Hamlet 2.” Yes, he knows that everyone died at the end of Hamlet. But what if Jesus showed up in a time machine? Now, we’re on to something!
HAMLET 2 goes on to lampoon everything we love about “inspirational teacher” movies, inspirational theaters, high-school drama clubs, and drama in general. In the process, it delivers achingly funny moments of self-awareness and over-the-top awfulness that, to my surprise, got me chuckling about ten minutes in and kept me laughing all the way ‘til the end credits.
I shouldn’t have loved HAMLET 2, but it does what it does so well that I can’t help it. Rock me, sexy Jesus!
