Hamlet 2

How many times have I bored my poor spouse stiff by returning from a screening with a stentorian, "This was the worst movie I've ever seen!" and proceeding to a litany of grievances.

It is not that I am given to exaggeration: Most of those movies were the worst I had seen up to then, given that recent American film production specializes in worst-ever-movies, so that, given the general dumbing down, they may triumph at the box office. And, of course, it is ridiculously easy to make the worst-ever-movies, seeing that excellence can go only so high, whereas downward the pit is bottomless.

Even so, I think I was more than ever justified, returning from Hamlet 2, in trumpeting my old jeremiad. That catastrophe is not only as bad as a movie can get, it also has the potential of hanging on to that distinction for quite some time to come. It is, furthermore, not only bad in some conventional, everyday way; it is also pretentious, distasteful, stupid, smug, and unutterably boring.

The pretentiousness starts with the press kit, whose first 13 pages are taken up by an interview in which some fictional Q puts questions to Andrew Fleming, the director and co-scenarist, and Pam Brady, the other co-scenarist, about the making of this film, with the conclusion that we should prepare ourselves for "gorgeousity." A half truth if ever there was one: It certainly made my gorge rise, but otherwise "monstrosity" would be nearer the mark.

The interview, however, is interesting insofar as it reveals Fleming and Brady as third-rate jokers, first-rate jargon bandiers, and not inconsiderable ignoramuses. They commit tautologies like "something [we] have in common with each other," grossly misuse the word "aggravating," spout garish neologisms like "scripting" and "sequelizing," and drop an absurd hyphen into what they spell as "pre-meditate."

The British comedian Steve Coogan plays Dana Marschz [sic], a failed actor turned drama teacher at Tucson's alleged West Mesa High School, although the film was shot not in Tucson but in Albuquerque because the latter provided more "flatness and bleached-out and depressing areas [to] make things funnier."

Marschz, to be "pronounced . . . oh, any attempt is close enough, really" according to the press kit, has written a sequel to Hamlet, which his students—the scruffiest and scurviest lot of loutish clods—are to enact as Hamlet 2. Although Marschz is a no-talent imbecile, the screenwriters (sorry, scripters) love him, and make this roller-skating ass, despite manifold hindrances that include numerous pratfalls, successful in the end.

Thus Hamlet 2 gets put on at the school—so penurious that the drama classes take place in the cafeteria, and the rehearsals in the gymnasium—in the most lavish fashion. It has nothing to do with any Hamlet known to man or beast, but is in fact an inept musical revue, featuring ghastly songs by one Ralph Sall with such titles as "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" and "Raped in the Face," and produced by the Bulletproof Recording Company, which if any music lovers should own guns it had better be.

The school production uses elaborate stagecraft, the like of which no school in Tucson or even Albuquerque could possibly imagine, and duly transfers to Broadway, where it presumably becomes an even greater hit than Carrie.

I have not see Steve Coogan in anything else (I am told he can be funny); here he gives a performance of paramount self-indulgence, fatuity and charmlessness. As his wife, Brie, we get the egregious Catherine Keener, an actress deficient in everything you can name and then some. As an ACLU attorney, cleverly named Cricket Feldstein, Amy Poehler exudes unconscionable cutesiness. Only Elisabeth Shue, playing herself, is at all watchable, but how desperate must this lovely actress have been to dip her toes into this cesspool. Even the crew in the Universal screening room at the preview I attended could summon up only scant laughter at the film's plethora of strictly-from-hunger japes.