27 August 2008 10:35 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news
After five days in limited release, Hamlet 2 is opening wide today (Wednesday) but ticket sales for it are likely to be as lackluster as the reviews for it, analysts suggest. The movie follows the formula developed to scientific precision by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team who made the Airplane movies a generation ago: keep the jokes coming fast enough and the audience won't notice the bad ones because the good ones will keep them laughing. The problem with Hamlet 2, several critics seem to suggest, is that the bad ones outweigh the good. As Claudia Puig observes in USA Today: "Its sharply funny moments make its lack of consistency all the more evident. The movie ends up feeling like a collection of moments, rather than a coherent quirky comedy." Stephen Holden concludes in the New York Times: "It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows." Many of the critics, even those who rap the movie mercilessly, at least give its star, British comedian Steve Coogan, high praise for his performance. Not so Kyle Smith in the New York Post, who says that he had been a fan of Coogan "until now." In this movie, he writes, Coogan mostly "makes silly faces and falls down frequently." As for the movie itself, Smith notes that "there's a long, long sequence in which a chorus of gay men sings "Maniac," which could have been funny if it had run 10 seconds instead of several minutes. Then there's another long, long sequence in which the same men sing 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' which is as redundant as Richard Simmons in drag."
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