Any film that features a song called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” as a key part of its plot is likely to create high expectations of non-stop hilarity. Hamlet 2 makes a lot of promises but doesn’t deliver. Despite an immensely talented cast, experienced filmmakers and a whole lot of enthusiasm, Hamlet 2 fails to live up to its potential.
Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) is an unsuccessful drama teacher in Tucson, Ariz. who is known for directing his own adaptations of Hollywood movies. After the school board cuts his funding, Dana decides to take drastic action to save his passion and livelihood. He writes a sequel to Hamlet, which features Jesus in a starring role as well as musical numbers and a dash of time travel. Soon the production is under attack from school administrators and angry parents, and Dana and his rag-tag group of students must work together to make their dreams come true.
The majority of the film is wrapped up in Dana’s struggles at home and at work. Dana himself is an absurd Michael Scott-type who fancies himself the hero in something like Dead Poets Society. Indeed, Dana constantly references these classic inspirational teacher flicks while trying to deal with his class, the standard mix of teens from the wrong side of the tracks and sheltered white kids. The film tries to treat the well-used story line as satire, but it’s too self-conscious to make it work. The students are caricatures, and the references are a little too tongue-in-cheek.
It seems the filmmakers spent all their creative energy on the play-within-the-film, which takes up far too little screen time. After what feels like an eternity, Hamlet 2 (the play) goes up, and unlike so much of the film, it doesn’t disappoint. The play is a strange mix of Grease, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and an elaborate theme park light show. The reactions the play inspires are just as amusing. The fun of the last quarter of the film vastly outshines the rest.
Even with a plot that is only occasionally interesting, a film with such a cast should have been more entertaining. Coogan is a prolific comedy actor, who most recently starred in box-office topper Tropic Thunder. He bumbles and curses his way through the film in a way that’s more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. Dana is vivid and pathetic and likeable enough, but he’s not terribly memorable. Among the drama students, Skylar Astin and Pheobe Strole are standouts. These former cast members of the Tony award winner Spring Awakening deftly handle the roles of teacher’s pet and perky racist, respectively. Catherine Keener plays Dana’s wife, Brie, a foul-mouthed former pot dealer, and Amy Poehler is a rabid ACLU lawyer. They are extremely talented comedic actors but they are criminally underused. How anyone can cast these women in a film and not include them in every single scene is one of life’s great mysteries.
With such a cast, Hamlet 2 should be much funnier than it actually is. The basic concept is clever but it gets muddled in half-baked parody that veers too close to those genre spoof movies for comfort. Unless you’re a huge Steve Coogan fan, you should just wait till the DVD is released and fast-forward to the “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” scene.
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