Audrey III, Hamlet 2

Hamlet 2 strikes me as being like a very good first draft. It's a good movie, especially if you've ever been, or been around, performers in your life, but it misses being great by a mile.

There's a better movie that could've been had here. It's funny, but more often in a smile, ok-that-was-funny way than laugh-out loud (though there are those as well), and it never quite comes together.

Its biggest problem is that of too-fast transitions. Most prominently (though this is not the only example), it wants to parody the pretensions of bad actors who think they're tortured artists. Fine by me.

But before it's over it also wants us to care about and like them. This is also fine, but you have to give us a reason. I think of the underrated A Midwinter's Tale (AKA In the Bleak Midwinter), which is about a group of not-necessarily bad, but definitely out-of-work, actors putting on a production of Hamlet (the first one).

That movie had its fun with theatrical types and backstage politics too, but it also has sympathetic characters. Hamlet 2 is spare of those.

As we're introduced to the supporting cast in any movie, we think (if only subconsciously), "Who are these people?" Hamlet 2 never really tells us, even though it has a strong cast of both name and no-name actors.

The whole movie's a bit like that: Not enough setup with only slightly more payoff.

A few more things: This is a movie that the trailer is a lot funnier than. There are also a couple of jokes misrepresented in the trailer, and they worked better there.

And incidentally: Has anybody else noticed that that the song "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is not only not as provocative as it wants to be--annoying Christians is like shooting fish in a barrel--but, musically, is completely ripped off from the title song of Little Shop of Horrors?

(Answer: Yes, somebody else has. Seriously, they're so close enough to identical as to seem actionable. I wonder if Cricket Feldstein--Amy Poehler's ACLU lawyer character in the film--will represent the songwriter.)

Hamlet 2 also has what may be the most obviously tacked-on attempt to give an "up" ending to a movie I've ever seen. You can almost hear the creative process: "OK, let's get Steve Coogan and as many of the name actors as we can, plus a few of the others, and give Steve a chance to do one of his impressions, ready and: Go!"