I am – Hercules!!

Directed by the versatile Andrew Fleming (“Threesome,” “The Craft,” “Dick,” “The In-Laws,” “Nancy Drew”) from a screenplay by Fleming and Pam Brady (“South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” “Team America: World Police”), the Aug. 27 Focus comedy “Hamlet 2” stars Steve Coogan, Amy Poehler, Catherine Keener, Elizabeth Shue and David Arquette.

"Thom," who caught it a month early, says it starts funny and builds to a hilarious final act:

So last night I was at the Chicago screening of ‘Hamlet 2’, a movie about Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), a failed actor turned high school drama coach. When the school board try’s to save money by cutting the arts, he creates an original work he hopes can generate the $6000 needed to save his department. The problem that it is a sequel to, as a disgruntled parent puts it “arguably the greatest play in the English language, and a poorly written one at that,” doesn’t seem to bother him.

Dana is blessed in this final trimester with a larger than average class. Drama, being the last department to get cut, has culled the shop class, art, computer and home ec students, who just happen to be 100% Latino. Combining the skills and acting chops of his new students he attempts to stage a career saving production of his original work ‘Hamlet 2’, even after the school bans the play for scenes like Jesus getting a handjob.

I’ve got some negative stuff to get out of the way, but before I do let me say that this is a funny movie, terrifically funny once the actual play starts. It’s a great comedy made greater by the fact that the humor comes from these characters, rather than in streams of profanity and the description of anatomical molestations (and before you label me a right wing Jesus freak well, for one thing, I enjoyed this movie but for another my biggest laugh this summer was Will Ferrell rubbing his balls on a drum kit.). The problems pop up whenever it trys to be any other type of comedy. When it goes for slapstick, like the running gag that has Dana skating everywhere but falling on his ass every few feet, it feels slow, and poorly staged and eventually repetitive. When everyone keeps pronouncing his oddly spelled last name wrong, and he keeps correcting them, and neither the name or its various mispronunciations are a funny word, it just feels like filler. There’s actually one great scene based off his surname, when he tries to correct an intense ACLU lawyer (played by Amy Poehler) and she responds “it doesn’t matter”. Too true.

On the other hand, when these elements are not being crow barred into the screenplay, there are a lot of laughs. Dana is a very sincere character, which is not to be confused with a very desperate character. He doesn’t want to save drama just so he can have a job, but because he really believes that through it he can impart some gift to his students. A complete lack of talent can’t dissuade him from this notion, and the struggle for greatness against his mediocrity provides a bulk of the humor. He sincerely loves theater and acting, so much so that he’s willing to have a heart to heart with the school paper’s 13 year old art critic about how he can improve his work. It’s kind of funny when he kicks a garbage can into someone’s head (if I hadn’t already seen it three times in the trailer) but it’s really funny when he tries to justify his clumsiness as an example of the unifying power of drama, then acts like nothing happened while calling the girl an ambulance. “It’s ringing,” he says, more like he’s trying to pass the time then trying to reassure the concussed girl.

Some of the supporting cast is really great. Catherine Keener and David Arquette play Dana’s wife and roommate, respectively. Keener has an open hostility towards everything here that plays terrifically off of Dana’s irrepressible sunny outlook and Arquette’s ability to piss her off with everything he says. When she says that if she has to spend any more time with their roommate she’s going to stab Dana to death in his sleep, he replys “What did I do so right to end up with you?”. Dana’s class is a different story though. While some of them are given different skills that will help to stage the play, overall they’re just trying to be one big joke, which is ‘gang bangers are actually literate actors’ and it never really works. The film also tries the reverse of this, a prim and proper white girl who starts talking ghetto and attacks (sexually) one of her Hispanic classmates, but again it feels forced, poorly set up and ends up not delivering. The only genuine laugh I got out of his class was when some of the Hispanic crew members start worrying they might go to Hell for helping produce this play.

But those are just little speedbumps that only kind of slow the movie down from time to time, and by the third act the roads all clear for the movie to switch into high gear with the actual performance of ‘Hamlet 2’. From this point on you will be laughing until you walk out of the theater. I’m not big on funny songs but the writing combined with the energy of the delivery and the absurdity of the material made that irrelevant. The reactions of various audience members are worth a chuckle too, be they for or against the play (‘that is some excellent wire work!’).

Overall this is going to be a much smaller comedy than something like Pineapple Express or Tropic Thunder, and it works on a different level, but the laughs it generates are genuine and many and that should be the yardstick of any comedy. Hamlet 2 has good writing, some great performances, and even if it didn’t it would still be the only place to see the Tucson High performance of ‘Hamlet 2’ and that alone would be worth the price of admission.