Shakespeare Must Be Rolling With This 2ND Hamlet

"Hamlet 2" despite the title is not a sequel to William Shakespeare's famous play, or the many film versions based on the play. Instead, Hamlet 2 is a comedy about a very unorthodox drama teacher named Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), who after never being able to become a successful actor himself, has later had to settle for being a high school drama teacher. With two dedicated returning drama students, Rand Posin (Skylar Astin) and Epiphany Sellars (Phoebe Strole) and a class full of new faces, who do not really care about acting, Dana is inspired to write a sequel to William Shakespeare's Hamlet and get the class motivated to perform it. Along the way, Dana loses his wife Brie (Catherine Keener) as the somewhat controversial subject matter of the new play gets Dana a lot of publicity, and trouble, Dana insists that the show must go on. The actual stage performance of the play is about as funny as you expect, the students who would rather fight among themselves, find that the play is worth doing. When one of Dana's students tells him he can't do the play Dana takes the boy home so he can speak with the boys parents. The expected Hollywood "troubled teen" cliche doesn't come, another one, the rich intelligent boy cliche is born here. Hamlet 2 is a pretty good satire of the inspirational teacher films that have been big for the last twenty years, or so, and it was kind of a refreshing change to have a film with those elements in it, but also lampooning it and getting as satirical and far fetched with it as they can possibly go. The film also gets the actors involved to act really badly to add camp to this film and further emphasize the satirical nature of it. All the actors are playing B movie versions of themselves, but they still do a really good job of it. Hamlet 2 is a smaller scale film and unfortunately will probably not do as well as some of this summer's other comedies, but for those who were lucky enough to have a theatre near them playing it, I would highly recommend it. Like a lot of independent comedies of recent years, Hamlet 2 is very quirky, offbeat and different. I think that is what I liked so much about it. I do admit that there were some pretty good mainstream comedies that have come out this summer, but the originality and the fact that this film was so over the top, but in a purely entertaining and goofy way I think I may have had just as much fun watching this film as some of the other really good films of this year. There are also some catchy and very humorous musical numbers in the film as well plus a cameo which I will not give away, but is actually written quite brilliantly. I realize that there is some material in this film that some people may find offensive, or consider debatable content, but I personally was not offended by it at all. I don't think that the things it poked fun at were ever done in a really nasty, or in a disrespectful way. I myself thought that yes some things were being parodied, but in almost such an innocent way (it may not seem so, but believe me it's true) that I found it really hard to be offended by this film at all. I really appreciated the offbeat and quirky humour of the film, the overacting that suited the film just fine and the catchy musical numbers which I didn't find offensive for the same reasons as I stated above. This film may be a bit too different for some people's tastes, but like a rare, or exotic treat it will find an audience that will appreciate it for what it is and this was certainly the case for me. One of the most entertaining, original and best comedies of the year so far. I give Hamlet 2 a 3 and on my avoidance scale I give it a 0. Go and see this wonderfully funny movie.