There has never yet been a Shakespeare movie that took place in the present day which worked well artistically and aesthetically. In opera, modern productions frequently work well, but it's harder with Shakespeare, because he is so poetic that the surroundings need to reflect it, lest they undermine the poetic integrity. The milieu can't be pedestrian, and the words can't be casually and mumblingly delivered. In Almereyda's Hamlet, everything is pedestrian. There are great actors on hand, but they are never given the opportunity to shine. There is no depth of either intellect or comedy here (as Stanley Wells has remarked, Hamlet is the most comical of all the tragedies),and as others have mentioned it is particularly ironic to cast Bill Murray in the role of the play's comic relief character and then have him be serious throughout. Sigh. There is occasional decent acting from Schreiber, Styles and Venora, but I have nothing good to say about the rest. They can do much better, but the director must have failed to inspire them.

The movie is a mess. All right, so it is trying to make some analogous points about a struggling film-maker, but it doesn't work well. To replace the medium of the play with the medium of the film as the thing in which the king's conscience will be caught is not a very interesting point, as plays and movies are so similar anyway.

There were a couple of things I liked. I liked having the "To be or not to be" speech in the "Action" aisle of the video store, because that speech really is much more about action than about death. I also liked how Julia Stiles made it very apparent that the cause of Ophelia's madness was her powerful love for him, which he didn't requite. I don't think this is necessarily the best interpretation of what happens, but at least it is a clear one.

But a main reason the movie is a mess is that the text is so chopped up. Omissions are inevitable lest the movie runs 4 hours, but it should be done with great care. Using the text selectively, and moving it around, always runs the risk of seriously undermining Shakespeare's points and messages, and one therefore needs a tremendously detailed understanding of the text (and its best interpretations) in order to edit it sensibly. Sadly, Almereyda does not possess such understanding.

The movie is not completely awful; it is watchable, but most things about it just aren't very good. The characters often don't speak clearly, which debases (yes, debases!) Shakespeare's language, and the modern surroundings tend to be dull, dull, dull. Of the twelve different Hamlets I have seen on DVD, I'm afraid this one is nothing less than the worst of the lot.

4 out of 10.

any movie that attempts to bring the Shakespeare canon to a new audience has to be allowed fairly wide latitude...so in the age of "Clerks", only right and fitting that we get a taste of Hamlet as a Kevin Smith-type community college slacker...filming from a severely truncated version of the play, this "Hamlet" still manages to provide some clever moments of originality...the "to be or not to be" monologue set in the "action" section of Blockbuster; an Ophelia who betrays Hamlet; the use of speakerphones and faxes to deliver dialog, in lieu of actors on screen...yeah, it's gimmicky...but if this is what it takes to get the Bard to the x and y-genners, then so be it...Joseph Papp would have approved...

that said, there's some interesting takes by Julia Stiles (Ophelia),Diana Venora (the Queen) and Bill Murray (Polonius) on their respective characters...it ain't all style over substance...

so come on, folks...you gave Mel a shot at this, didn't ya? give it a go...

...isn't it getting a little old to have teenagers and young adults talking Shakespearean talk? True, we consider that language beautiful, but it's starting to just seem out of place. I will say that the cast members in this "Hamlet" do a good job in their roles; a previous reviewer noted that when you see what happens to the title character (Ethan Hawke) here, you feel that he has even more of an incentive to do what he does. It's just that if they make an updated version of a Shakespeare play, I think that they should just use modern language like they did with the "Othello" adaptation "O". Also starring Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Julia Stiles, Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright and Paul Bartel.