I'll admit that I'm a sucker for sarcastic movies, especially ones involving song and dance. So you can imagine my surprise when Hamlet 2 started airing previews, advertising humor, dot dot dot. I mean, c'mon..."Rock Me, Sexy Jesus?" It was bound to be hilarious, right?
Wrong. Cut to present and me saying, "What a steaming pile of ass poo." It was garbage. Greg and I almost walked out and I never walk out of movies. Well, there was that one "Trapped." But it was a free movie...later, we kept referring to it as "Trapped with Kevin Bacon."
Hamlet 2 was a mess. The first forty-five plus minutes were entirely composed of exposition. Dana the drama teacher living in Tuscon with a distant hard as nails wife who wants a baby. He's an out of work infomercial actor with such credits as "Herpacol" who's passionate about performing once popular films on the high school stage. The new school year brings an unruly set of high school misfits to his drama class and he must work out a way to get through to them.
Oo! I know, the majesty of song! Oo! Even better! The majesty of song sung through the offensive and lyrical verses of an anti-religious and sexually preverse script! But performed by sixteen year olds! YES! Solid Gold!
What started out as a funny gimic...a gimic that only works on the preview level was taken a step further. And it failed miserably. It wasn't what it set out to be, not by a long shot. I went in expecting some higher message, at least on an intellectual while being funny, level. They mentioned the use of Jesus in a Time Machine, Jesus as a Celebrity, Jesus on a cell phone. For a brief and shining moment, I thought they were on the right track. I thought they were going somewhere hilarious that I could follow.
But it delivered nothing but slapstick comedy. The kind of slapstick comedy that I'm assuming the common man would get tired of, especially after the fourth call back to clumsy roller skating jokes. Or perhaps the sixth call back to "That quiet girl in glass getting pounded in the head with yet another inanimate object." Solid gold.
What I found most shocking were the amount of laughs it got. I found myself glancing around the theater hoping to find a roomful of runaway mental patients, perhaps hopped up on painkillers and desiring the numbing effects of false commercial success. But no...just a theater full of normal every day goons. It made me sad.
I left plotting ways to come up with the next laugh-worthy screenplay. One that does not include jokes about balls, acid, molestation, teenage sexuality or the divine nature of our Lord and Sexy Savior.
Do yourself a favor and miss this movie.
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