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.

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.