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Don't expect a night with The Bard. This cuckoo farce asks: Can an L.A. actor stuck doing ads for herpes cures find happiness by moving to Tucson and teaching drama to high schoolers? Probably not. But you'll be wearing a happy face for two hours watching the brilliant Brit comic Steve Coogan play him. Him being Dana Marschz (pronounced Mars-chhh-zzz by those who dare), a sterile recovering alcoholic who gets slagged regularly by a snotty kid critic for staging movies (Dead Poets Society, Erin Brockovich) as plays. "He fisted us," cries Dana. Pumped by the addition of Latin students to his class of whitey Christians and closeted gays, Dana rouses himself — not with his wife (the dry, dazzling Catherine Keener), who's boinking their friend (David Arquette), but by creating an original musical. It's a sequel to Hamlet that somehow involves a time machine and Hamlet (Joseph Julian Soria) raising his voice in song to implore Christ (Coogan) to "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus." Tucson's civic leaders try to close the show. Enter ACLU lawyer Cricket Feldstein (Amy Poehler has you laughing at hello), and unexpected support from Leaving Las Vegas star Elisabeth Shue, playing herself as a Hollywood expat who prefers working in a sperm clinic. Director Andrew Fleming (Dick) keeps the pace snappy. And the script he wrote with Pam Brady (South Park) recovers handily every time it hits a speed bump. It's Coogan's breakthrough star performance that holds it all together. He's sensational.
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You can almost hear the hilarity that must have erupted at the pitch meetings while watching “Hamlet 2,” a comedy with a lot of great-in-description ideas that play about half as funny onscreen. Amusing but unevenly inspired tale of a deluded high school drama teacher’s attempt to stage a career-saving extravaganza has some laughs, to be sure. But it’s anyone’s guess whether the $10 million Focus Features dropped for worldwide rights at Sundance will turn out to be a sound investment or another case of “Happy, Texas”-style festival fever overestimating a pic’s broader appeal.
Things start brightly with clips from the highlights in unpronounceably surnamed Dana Marschz’s (Steve Coogan) professional acting career: notably, commercials for Jack La Lanne’s Power Juicer and herpes medication.
Flash forward to the present, in which he’s given up the tinsel of Hollywood to teach drama at Tucson’s West Mesa High. His best students (OK, his only students), closeted gay Rand (Skylar Astin) and Christian proselytizer Epiphany (Phoebe Strole), are starring in Marschz’s latest biannual school play, this one a stage version of “Erin Brockovich.”
Next day, the reviews come in, bringing another scathing notice from the school paper’s critic (Shea Pepe), who looks all of 13 years old. Still, his judgment is pithy.
When the fall brings word that budget cuts will soon eliminate drama from the curriculum entirely, the critic recommends Marschz try creating something original rather than awkwardly transferring yet another popular movie to the boards.
The new semester also brings a surprising surge of enrollees, if only because classes held in asbestos-laden portable classrooms have been canceled and drama is one of the few electives left.
As a result, white-bread Rand and Epiphany are suddenly swamped by a rowdy group of Latino and Latina “gangbangers” (or so Marschz and his pets assume). Once their initial disinterest is somewhat overcome, Marschz discovers an acting natural in the hitherto hostile Haywood (as in Jablowme) aka Octavio (Joseph Julian Soria), casting him as Hamlet.
This sequel won’t be wasting any time on soliloquies -- here Hamlet uses a time machine to reverse the deaths incurred in Shakespeare’s “bummer” original. It also features appearances by Hillary Clinton, Einstein and others, not to mention Jesus Christ (played by Marschz himself) moonwalking on water in the production number “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” accompanied by a Tucson gay men’s chorus.
Once word gets out, Principal Rocker (Marshall Bell), then the whole community wants to pull plug. Smelling a freedom-of-speech struggle, the ACLU dispatches legal zealot Cricket Feldstein (Amy Poehler) to see that the show goes on. It does -- and if not as intentionally funny as, say, the Broadway opening-night climax of “Stayin’ Alive” was unintentionally so, the “Hamlet 2” within “Hamlet 2” proves a colorful exercise in multimedia bad taste.
Talented Brit thesp Coogan is given a little too much rope here, while conversely, some estimable supporting players are given short shrift. Catherine Keener does nail bilious laughs as Marschz’s mate, thesp’s most acidly fed-up wife since “Your Friends and Neighbors” (in which her husband was also a drama teacher).
But casting a game Elisabeth Shue as “Elisabeth Shue” (who’s given up acting to be a Tucson nurse) is an idea that promises more than is delivered.
David Arquette is barely utilized as the couple’s not-especially-welcome boarder. Slickly handled on a reported $9 million budget, pic reps an uptick from helmer Andrew Fleming’s last bigscreen effort, the widely dismissed “Nancy Drew,” though as cheeky farce, it’s nowhere near the standard of his underappreciated 1999 Watergate spoof “Dick.”
Script, co-written with Pam Brady, is hit-and-miss in terms of verbal wit and individual gags. But package moves along quickly, and overall concept remains amusing even when there’s a dud moment or three.
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