Hamlet 2: Steve Coogan tortures the Bard

Focus Features

It's impossible for us to hate a movie featuring Catherine Keener.

Details

Opens at Neptune and other theaters, Fri., Aug. 22. Rated R. 92 minutes.

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More About

• Sundance Film Festival
• Will Ferrell
• Steve Coogan
• Jesus Christ
• Hillary Clinton

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Hamlet 2 debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it sold for $10 million to Focus Features—which makes it but one more overpriced snow bunny sure to melt the moment it hits the multiplex. It's the quintessential Sundancer: disdainful of middle-class Middle America, willfully "edgy," and made by a Hollywood director looking to make his big comeback with, dig, integrity this time around. In this case, it's Andrew Fleming, whose underrated Dick reimagined All the President's Men with Will Ferrell as Bob Woodward, but whose later films (among them the woeful In-Laws remake) were released straight to Dollar Generals. Even better, it's a film about making capital-A art for folks who just don't get it—in this instance, a Tucson high school, where Steve Coogan's Dana Marschz is a drama instructor trying to stage a Hamlet sequel involving a time machine, Jesus Christ, Snoopy, handjobs, Hillary Clinton, a gay men's chorus, elaborate dance numbers, and a song containing the lyric "raped in the face." The movie comes with its own self-defense mechanism: If you don't think it's funny, you just don't get it, man. Fine with me.