Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

‘Hamlet 2’ gleefully chooses ‘to be’

For a film like “Hamlet 2” to work — even the title is hilariously ridiculous — it has to sell the absurdity completely.

It does.

Steve Coogan, who stars as Dana Marschz, a desperate failed-actor-turned-drama-teacher who writes a sequel to Shakespeare’s famed tragedy, never lets up, whether his character experiences amped-up over-enthusiasm or despondency (he spends a lot of time bouncing back and forth in-between the two).

It’s a fantastic performance, but the supporting cast is equally committed, which goes a long way toward making prickly characters sympathetic, or something like it.

The always reliable Catherine Keener, for instance, plays Dana’s wife Brie, self-involved with a shrewish streak, yet you like her anyway because she never loses focus on what’s important to her: herself. Phoebe Strole’s Epiphany Sellars, a religious drama student, is casually racist by way of sheltered ignorance, but hilarious as she learns to love the thug life.

And Elisabeth Shue shines while playing a somewhat lesser version of ... Elisabeth Shue, never straying from the self-deprecation required to land her in Tucson, Ariz., as a nurse sick of the acting business.

That level of wacked-out intensity is crucial to the success of the movie, because, while frequently laugh-out-loud funny, “Hamlet 2” is enough of a hit-and-miss affair that it requires the confidence that another bizarre moment — Amy Poehler as a profane ACLU lawyer, say — is right around the corner.

And happily, it always is.

Marschz went into acting to work out issues with his father with little success (we see a sampling of his work at the beginning of the film). He winds up in Tucson (“where dreams go to die”), teaching high-school drama. In a typical school year, he has only two students, Epiphany and the closeted Rand (Skylar Astin), who perform two-person versions of such popular films as “Erin Brockovich.” Asbestos in classroom ceilings results in the ranks swelling to many more students, mostly Latino kids who have little interest in drama and less in Marschz.

Marschz, with the self-confidence of the truly delusional, is nearly blind to their indifference. Life at home is rocky, as well — much to Brie’s displeasure, they’ve had to take in a boarder (David Arquette) to make ends meet. And Marschz seems unable to get Brie pregnant.

Then, the unkindest cut: The school principal (Marshall Bell) tells Marschz the school board has decided to cut drama. Panicked, trying to save the program and impress the ninth-grade drama critic who torments him, Marschz decides to stage his own composition — “Hamlet 2.”

Wait, Brie points out, didn’t just about everyone die in the end?

In typical fashion, Marschz sees a solution: “I have a device.”

That device is a time machine, which Hamlet will use to prevent all of those messy deaths that make the play so great (again: not concerned). And he will bring along his pal, Jesus. It’s a measure of Marschz’s ridiculously self-centered commitment that he begins referring to Hamlet as Hamlet 1.

Word of the play gets out, and results in an uproar, of course, as well it might — one of the big production numbers is “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” which includes Jesus (with the “sexy swimmer bod”) moonwalking on water. The entire production, basically an excuse for Marschz to work out his daddy issues, is gleefully offensive, yet somehow sort of winning in spite of itself.

“Hamlet 2’s” story is as old and clichéd as any “let’s-put-on-a-show” movie — of course there are more layers to the seemingly dangerous Octavio (Joseph Julian Soria), for instance. It’s the telling of the story that is so demented, so twisted, so funny. “The play’s the thing,” as our man Hamlet (in 1) says. And in “Hamlet 2,” it’s a funny thing, indeed.

Rated: R for language including sexual references, brief nudity and some drug content.

Hamlet 2 (Rated R) Three Stars (Good)