Mr. Coogan's Opus | Steve Coogan strikes a victorious pose as actor-turned-teacher Dana Marschz in Hamlet 2.
HAMLET 2
Directed by Andrew Fleming. Starring Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler, Elisabeth Shue. Opens Fri, Aug 22.
***
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. And at the high school where drama teacher Dana Marschz is employed, those who teach gym are constantly shooing him off the basketball court where he’s trying to hold rehearsal.
As the new comedy Hamlet 2 opens, the melancholy Dana has sunk about as low on the showbiz ladder as it’s possible to go: a failed actor whose principal credits include a guest shot on Xena: Warrior Princess and a bit as the “There’s got to be an easier way!” guy in a late-night juicer informercial, he’s now reduced to a starvation-wage teaching gig in Tucson, Ariz.
And even that humiliating job is on the verge of disappearing, thanks to budget cutbacks (and a long string of bad reviews in the school paper). But when a scheduling fluke delivers him the biggest drama class he’s ever had in his life, Dana decides to go out with a bang and stage as his final show something called Hamlet 2, a delirious musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play in which Hamlet uses a time machine to change history and prevent all those deaths in Act V. Jesus fits into the plan somehow too.
Hamlet 2 was co-written by Pam Brady, who worked on the scripts for South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and Team America: World Police, and like those films, it’s a celebration of the cleansing, liberating power of political incorrectness. Dana’s play, which is full of onstage sex and a big production number called “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” becomes a cause célèbre when the school tries to shut it down. The ACLU even wades into the action—Amy Poehler has some very funny moments playing a tough-as-nails civil-rights attorney with the absurd name Cricket Feldstein. By the time opening night rolls around, Hamlet 2 has become the most talked-about play in America.
The film’s final half-hour or so, in which Dana and his students perform Hamlet 2 to an incredulous (but surprisingly receptive) audience, is a lot of fun—you totally buy it when the sock-hop singalong “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” wins the crowd over.
But the first two-thirds of the film are much more unsteady. It sounds counterintuitive to criticize a comedy for encouraging the audience to laugh too much at its main character, but as Steve Coogan plays him, Dana is so clueless, so pathetic, so abject in his decade-out-of-date wardrobe, that it’s not much fun to watch him experience each new humiliation. The poor guy’s wife, Brie, is even played by Catherine Keener in full ball-breaker mode. It’s no wonder that Dana needs to go to a fertility clinic—if I were married to Brie, I think my sperm would be demoralized too. (The Marschzes’ trip to the fertility clinic does include the film’s biggest WTF? touch, though: the nurse turns out to be Elisabeth Shue. She’s not just played by Elisabeth Shue; she is Elisabeth Shue—she tells Dana she got sick of Hollywood, dropped out of the business, and got her nursing degree.)
Shue’s extended cameo is typical of Hamlet 2’s we’ll-try-anything spirit—this is a very uneven comedy, but at least it’s unpredictable. There’s a strange role for David Arquette, as the Marschzes’ boarder (whom Brie has apparently forbidden from speaking), and a slapstick running gag involving a female student who keeps getting hit on the head. (She performs the same comic function in Hamlet 2 as the lapdogs did in A Fish Called Wanda—as an innocent target of unceasing physical abuse.) But I wished director Andrew Fleming, who also made the classic Watergate spoof Dick, had spent less time on Dana’s bumbling and a little more time showing us his students gradually getting caught up in making Hamlet 2 a reality.
Still, for all its flaws, Hamlet 2 has some of the summer’s biggest laughs. (“If my Dad finds out what I’ve been up to,” Dana-as-Jesus exclaims at one point, “he’s gonna crucify me!”) Then again, maybe I’m cutting it some extra slack simply because it contains one of the most positive depictions of a critic I’ve ever seen in a movie: Coogan regards the theatre reviewer at the school paper as his personal nemesis, but every time he talks to him, the kid gives him excellent dramaturgical advice.
