Bill Murray doing Shakespeare is the cutest thing ever, it may be the first time Polonius steals the show. Incredible for the NYC buildings, streets, and upper class apartments, creating one great slice of atmosphere after another. The self-awareness of it makes it funny too. All those young 90s actors having fun, and McLaughlan as the King is so great and nuanced you somehow feel bad for the villain. A festive celebration of Shakespeare, cinema, and Gen X. So, films like this are a joke when they're released, hence its reputation, but in time they become works of art. One, because Shakespeare is immortal, and two, this era here of 2000 New York, this is a painting of nostalgia, from a long-gone era of history. It's incredibly fresh.

Otherwise this is the perfect way for young people to understand the play, how the casting gives you an immediate impression who these people are, framing the dialogue in a way that you always understand it. The irony when you get a good rendition you bond to it and don't want to imagine it any other way.

Here is the first film version of Hamlet to come along in modern New York. The director's use of New York is fun to watch for this native New Yorker, although how a limo can quickly move from 42nd St. between Broadway and Eighth Avenue to 48th St. and Sixth Avenue is beyond me.

But asisde from that, all we care about when we see Hamlet is how is the text handled, by both the director and the cast. The director, Michael Almereyda, has cut into the script and most of the film runs surprising lean for something that runs one hour, fifty-three minutes. His use of short films in the background, speaker phones, TV's and the like run the gambit from ingeneous to "Give me a BREAK!"

The casting however is inconsitent, for which we can certainly blame the director. Ethan Hawke, in the title role, has drive and energy. But if anybody remembers the TV show "The Critic", when they had Keanu Reeves doing Hamlet, then you know what I'm thinking. The words "Dude" and "Whoa" seems ready to break into Hawke's speeches at anytime. The complexity is replaced by a whiny "I'm in pain, but I'm cool" attitude for the bulk of the film and it doesn't really work. The mumbling of at least a fourth of his lines doesn't help either. He works better in silence, brooding.

The silence works even better for Julia Styles as Ophelia. When quiet, the pain of abandonment and loss is heartfelt. Then she opens her mouth, and the lack of a developed character as well as an appalling lack of command of Shakespeare's words is obvious. Ophelia, never mind getting thee to a nunnery, get thee "Beverly Hills, 90210", GO!

Bill Murray veers form earnestness to his Lounge Singer's act from "SNL" when doing Polonius. I know the role was suppose to be for comic relief. But after a while, everything Murray says is funny- intenionally or otherwise.

Kyle McLaughlin, as Claudius, doesn't fare much better. There is little distinction in his line readings, and in the end, he just comes off as a one-trick pony. Diane Verona is marginally better as Gertrude. The attitude is there, as is the pain, but her line readings lack a freshness to them.

The standouts are Sam Sheppard as the Ghost, Steve Zahn and Dechen Thurman as Rosencrnatz & Guildenstern, and especially Liev Schrieber as Laertes. Schrieber in paricularly as the energy, clearity, and believabilty that makes you wonder what if he played Hamlet instead of Schrieber. We probably would have had a better movie.

Hawke's Hamlet is suffering from major clinical depression, and the film reflects this, meaning that watching it gives you some symptoms of major clinical depression, such as exhaustion, loss of willpower, and desire to end it all and just go to sleep. While the film was objectively excellent and the tone incredibly well conveyed, I feel it was the wrong tone for a movie this length. It made it difficult to finish, because it was so utterly hopeless and depressing. The adaptation itself was good, however. The overall sense I got was not so much a scenic update (Denmark to New York) as a cultural one. Ethan Hawke's Hamlet is American; were he transposed to modern England he would be different, and different still if he were French (most obviously by a clearly improved sense of fashion--that hat needs to go). One of the reviews on Netflix described the movie's Ophelia as "a brooding adolescent" rather than "the classical indecisive waif". I found this description to apply to the movie as a whole, and not just Ophelia. Ethan Hawke's Hamlet is angsty, and there's no way around it. He's petulant and selfish and the very picture of the modern American adolescent male. He cares only for himself, and is insane in the sense of being so depressed he's lost touch with reality. He spends hours upon hours watching and making bad-quality videos (as a side note, why are movies in movies always so pixelated with ludicrously bad resolution, and why are they always strongly tinted green or blue? Don't any fictional characters have HDTV?). Holed up in his room with his own little mind in place of a world, it's no wonder he goes off the deep end and starts trying to kill people.

It was hard to feel any empathy for Hamlet; while he was doubtlessly suffering, he used this as a license to wallow in self-pity. I actually found myself siding with Claudius and his mother. Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship, on the other hand, was very well done. I wish the movie had expanded more on it.

Overall, this is a well-done film, but slow and difficult to stick with.

As a final note, I felt the R-rating was undeserved; the only justification I could find for it was the relentlessly depressing tone.