Hamlet 2 is a funny comedy.

It should have been a lot funnier.

A whole lot funnier.

Steve Coogan stars in the film as Dana Marschz, a hack actor with a name no one can pronounce.

The movie opens with a few hints of his past acting career -- bad movies and worse commercials -- and moves to Dana's current life.

He's a high school drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona. His students specialize in stage versions of popular movies, such as Eric Brokovich.

Bad? Far worse than that.

Dana lives with his nutjob wife (Catherine Keener) and a silent boarder, played by David Arquette.

One fall term, Dana's drama class is suddenly packed with new students. Turns out they're just escaping the asbestos in the other classrooms, a crisis that saw all the other electives cancelled. Dana now has a class full of juvenile delinquents, and he's determined to engage them in an original play.

Hey! How about a sequel to Hamlet? Dana is not deterred by the reminder that everybody is dead at the end of Hamlet. Creating a sequel just requires the use of a time machine.

While his idiotic play is taking shape, Dana deals with his strange wife and their fertility issues. This gives him plenty of comic rope for loose pants and sperm count jokes, and it brings Elizabeth Shue into the story. She plays herself. Well, a version of herself.

In Hamlet 2, Shue has become so fed up with Hollywood that she's working as a nurse. It's one of the movie's finest moments.

Dana struggles with writing, discovers some of his badly behaved students are great actors, shows his bare bottom more than once and feels inspired.

The school board tries to cancel the performances of Hamlet 2, objecting to the content, but a civil liberties lawyer (Amy Poehler) turns up to help Dana (and mouth off at everybody.)

There's a song-and-dance sequence in Hamlet 2 called Rock Me Sexy Jesus that viewers are supposed to be up in arms about, but it all sounds like a publicity ploy.

The play, Hamlet 2, is hilarious, but not even close to shocking.

Hamlet 2 -- the movie -- tries everything from anti-semitic jokes to shocking songs to a disco-dancing Messiah, but almost nothing in the movie is offensive. In the world of comedy, that's not a good thing.

There's something wrong with Hamlet 2, in that none of the various subplots ever come together, and it looks as if the movie was edited by committee.

Coogan is funny, but a lot of the really inspired bits in the film go to other people, and he's often left to play into a vacuum.

However, even running at mediocre, Steve Coogan is better than most, so Hamlet 2 is not a total write-off.

Think of it as funny vignettes rather than as a single comedy movie, and you'll be fine.

(This film is rated 14-A)
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