Director: Michael Almereyda
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Sam Shepard, Diane Venora, Bill Murray, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber, Steve Zahn, Jeffrey Wright, Dechen Thurman, Karl Geary

- Reviewed by Rachel

Once, when asked to describe the worst torture imaginable, my friend Elisa said “having the bottom of my feet scratched while listening to Patrick Swayze sing 'She’s Like The Wind'.” The first ten minutes of Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet are about as pleasant. Hamlet opens with a hurried, false, emotionless speech from Hawke, and it goes downhill from there. 

The few good points:

• Hamlet’s many soliloquies are delivered on videotape—Hawke plays back tape of himself speaking into a sort of video diary. He wanders around Hotel Elsinore with a portable video player, engrossed by his own image. It’s a nice way to translate the speeches to a modern setting, and an interesting comment on his self-obsession.
• According to my friend Jennifer, who is a designer for Nordstrom, the costumes are quite stylish. (I didn’t notice anything spectacular, but what do I know?)
• Ophelia, Horatio, and the dead King seemed to know what the hell they were doing.
• The Mousetrap, the short film Hamlet makes to catch the conscience of the King, is pretty darn cool.

And that’s about it. The performances in general were strained and unnatural, causing squirming and eye rolling to continue throughout. The actors appeared to have needed more rehearsal time and some direction on the dialog. The delivery in most cases was high-school-production-spit-it-out-fast-before-I-forget caliber. Exceptions, again, would be Ophelia, Horatio, and the dead King.

The set looked low-budget and thrown together at the last minute. And the product placement …. was….just….obnoxious. It screamed HI, LOOK AT ME!  I NEEDED MORE MONEY TO GET THIS CRAPPY MOVIE MADE!!! It’s one thing to have a character casually sip a Pepsi. It’s another thing entirely to have the ghost of Hamlet’s father materialize transparently in front of a seven-foot tall Pepsi One vending machine. The “to be or not to be” speech was also bastardized, being delivered as Hamlet wanders a Blockbuster video store, pausing for excruciatingly long moments in front of an entire wall of Blockbuster video boxes. But hey, at least they kept that speech. “Alas, poor Yorik” didn’t make the cut (?!?!?!?).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were well-performed…but what happened to them? The flashback where Hamlet tells Horatio how he turned the tables on the two numbskulls sort of stops short—and suddenly Hamlet is back at Elsinore. R & G’s fates would be unclear to anyone who didn’t know better.

Basically, this movie was painfully bad. It sucked a**.

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