“I feel I’ve been raped - in the face!” cries Steve Coogan’s f🐟ailed actor turned gormless drama teacher ✃Dana Marschz after his high-school stage adaptation of Erin Brockovich is savaged by a 13-year-old critic.
A pompous buffoon from Tucson whose deluded faith in his limited abilities rival✨s even Alan Partridge’s, the role is a good match for the comic’s goofy blend of hapless ineptitude and blind optimism.
As amusing as he is, though, Andrew Fleming’s follow-up to the anaemic Nancy Drew isn’t꧑ nearly as funny as it thinks it is.
Faced with a hostile wife (Catherine Keener), ap❀athetic students and a principal (Marshall Bell) who wants to close his department, Marschz decides to mount the mother of all shows: the eponymous Hamlet 2, a sequel to Shakespeare’s original invo🗹lving lightsaber duels, time travel and Jesus Christ.
The spectacle that ensues is an enjoyably taste-free blow-out reminiscent of Jerry Springer: The Opera and, thanks to its big number ‘Rock Me Sexy Jesus’, ‘Spring🎃time For Hitler’ from The Producers.
Even with this in its arsenal, though, Fl𒆙eming’s farce falls alarmingly flat in places, there being only so many ways - an adve෴rt for herpes medication here, some awkward rollerblading there - of showing Marschz to be an utter doofus.
Compensations come in the feisty form of Amy Poehler’s brash ACLU lawyer and a near-wordless cam🍸eo from David Arquette as Coogan and Keener’s lugh🅷ead of a lodger.
But in one🐻 area Hamlet 2 gets it jaw-droppingly wrong: by having one-time Oscar hopeful Elisabeth Shue parody herself as a Hollywood emigre who has moved to Arizona to become a nurse.
As a single, satirical gag, this perplexing appearance might have worked. The more she turns up, however, the more it dawns that what we are
ဣ really witnessing is a career suicide every bit as final𝐆 as Nicolas Cage’s actual one in Leaving Las Vegas.
Neil Smith
