Hamlet 2

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Funny excuses an awful lot, and at its best, Hamlet 2 is nothing short of hilarious.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

As a movie, Hamlet 2 is lively, energetically daft, and very, very scrappy -- a broader, more loony-tunes knockoff of "Waiting for Guffman."

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Occasionally sloppy, with a finale so abrupt and incoherent that it feels like something is missing. But it's also pleasantly odd and truly funny, and it builds in strength as it goes along.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

Like its low-key star, Hamlet 2 is more likely to elicit quiet chuckles than raucous laughter.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

It's Coogan's breakthrough star performance that holds it all together. He's sensational.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie is an ideal showcase for the talents of Coogan.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Coogan's screen persona is vain, dim, angry, and deeply miserable, and his handful of scenes here with a smilingly harsh Catherine Keener are little masterpieces of comic sadomasochism.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Arquette wander in and out of frame, but like everyone else in this film, they're eclipsed by Coogan's gloriously unhinged performance, which has the lunatic, semi-meta tone of a parody within a parody.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A frequently amusing and consistently outrageous but ultimately tiresome farce.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Elisabeth Shue has a strange role as a version of herself who has given up acting for nursing.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The film, which really is sloppy, slips around in terms of tone and goes every which way.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

A rather mediocre experience, offering sporadic laughs but never achieving the level of consistent humor necessary to make this memorable.

The Hollywood Reporter Duane Byrge

Attaining somewhat of a bad parody of a comedy, screenwriters Andrew Fleming and Pam Brady have slapped together a string of gags in a hit-and-miss dither. Some of it is quite brainy.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

Mostly, though, there's the endlessly resourceful, endlessly inventive, bedazzling Mr. Coogan. Hamlet Schmamlet. Not since "Death of a Salesman" has failure been quite so entertaining.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Not infrequently the movie is as mediocre as its target. The great Steve Coogan movie has yet to be made.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

In the new comedy Hamlet 2, Coogan comes perilously close to wearing out his welcome. It's actually a pretty fascinating sight.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

There's a lot of potential here, and a sharper script might have made all the difference.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Let's just say that, when the parody looks indistinguishable from the parodied, something's gone awry.

Variety Dennis Harvey

Amusing but unevenly inspired tale of a deluded high school drama teacher's attempt to stage a career-saving extravaganza has some laughs, to be sure.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Not nearly as uproarious as it should be.

Time Richard Corliss

Hamlet 2 is as needy as its hero -- because it wants not to be probing or profound or even witty but, above all else, to be loved.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Only in its aggressively imaginative profanity is the film consistent.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

It's an unhinged, off-the-wall comedy that will try anything once, an uneven film in which the hits are so dead-on that the misses don't seem to matter.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

So wearying that it makes you feel duped for being open to it in the first place. Hamlet 2 works so hard at being entertaining, in that quirky, Indie 101 sense, that it just grinds you down.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Much like the play within it, Hamlet 2 is lousy. The main difference is that the play is SUPPOSED to be awful. The movie about the play is supposed to be funny.

New York Post Kyle Smith

The laughs begin with the excellent title Hamlet 2 - and they end there.