Troupers in 'Tropic, 'Hams in 'Hamlet,'

Watching “Hamlet 2,” I was reminded of the words of Edmund the Martyr, King of East Anglia, on his deathbed, Nov. 20, 869 — “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
    Well, duh. Dying is like rolling off a log ... sometimes exactly like it, if the log happens to be suspended over a thousand-foot chasm. And comedy is a lot likelier to die than death is to be funny — I’ve got lots of wisdom like that (catalog available on request) — which is borne out by the film. Oh, how often in “Hamlet 2” does a too too solid joke melt, thaw, and resolve itself into doodoo!

(By the way, Edmund the Martyr never, to the best of my knowledge, said anything of the kind. But the quote has been attributed to Edmund Kean, Edmund Gwenn and several other Edmunds, as well as to such usual suspects as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Groucho Marx. I have capriciously chosen to drag Mr. Martyr into it, just to mess with the search engines. He predates all the others, so — with the help of just a few of you — I might be able to turn a ridiculous impossibility into conventional wisdom. Go, team!)

“Hamlet 2” starts with a great title and a promising concept: Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) is a grotesquely unsuccessful writer/director/actor who has been reduced to teaching a drama class at West Mesa High in Arizona. The school productions are generally stage adaptations of popular movies: Near the beginning, we see a little of his version of “Erin Brockovich”; later, he makes reference to his musical version of “The Lake House.”

His long-suffering wife (Catherine Keener) tries to stand by her man, even though Dana’s lack of income has forced the couple to take the world’s dullest man (David Arquette) as a boarder. Things get worse when Dana’s class — traditionally attended by two lone students, closet case Rand (Skylar Astin) and straightlaced Bible-thumper Epiphany (Phoebe Strole) — suddenly swells with the addition of a couple dozen less aesthetically inclined teens, whose preferred classes are in rooms now shut down for asbestos fiber removal.

When the evil principal (Marshall Bell) announces that drama class will be cut after this year, Dana hopes to make enough money to save the course by putting on a flashy production of his own script, “Hamlet 2.” Since everyone in “Hamlet” dies, Dana’s story requires Hamlet to have a time machine, allowing him to go back and change the tragic events, with some help from Einstein, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Jesus. In short, the film is “Mr. Holland’s Opus” crossed with “Waiting for Guffman.”

I cackled loudly about a dozen times at individual gags without ever finding the whole all that funny. Director Andrew Fleming (“The In-Laws,” “Nancy Drew”) wrote the script with Pam Brady, who shares credit with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on “Team America: World Police” and “South Park” (both the series and the feature). While she brings along those projects’ eagerness to cross the lines of taste, the inspiration level is a lot lower. The jokes and plot developments are obvious — precisely what anybody would come up with, given the premise.

That doesn’t mean they’re not ever funny, but the utter lack of surprise becomes wearying. The only moments that aren’t predictable are those that barely make sense, including the character of Elisabeth Shue (as herself).

On top of that, the narrative in “Hamlet 2” is terribly sloppy. Things lurch forward unevenly, with major developments taking place behind the audience’s and Dana’s backs. His sequel to “Hamlet” may be his masterpiece, but he seems to bring in few of the elements that make it “work”; the students do it all, while he’s busy with his crumbling marriage and his irritating self-pity. “Hamlet 2” feels like a desperately cut-down version of a three-hour rough cut.

And, if the play works for the audience in the film, it never does for the rest of us. In “The Producers,” you could believe the reaction that made “Springtime for Hitler” a hit. In “Waiting for Guffman,” the reception was painfully realistic. Here, we are asked to suspend a little too much disbelief and buy that people love Dana’s play on its own terms.

Coogan is a master at playing jerks, but Dana is too silly, too stupid and too unappealing to enlist us on his side. He really is an annoying idiot who hasn’t so much been dealt a lousy hand as he has earned it through his many faults. Coogan’s best jerk performances have been when he’s playing (literally) himself; in both “Coffee and Cigarettes” and “A Cock and Bull Story,” he is perfect as an insecure actor named Steve Coogan.

By one of those trivial coincidences that are so handy for otherwise unlikely segues, Coogan plays yet another dopey director in last week’s “Tropic Thunder,” where his part is smaller but much better modulated. (Another coincidence: Both characters appropriate the identity of Jesus.) In many ways, Ben Stiller’s comedy makes an instructive comparison to “Hamlet 2.”

Most of you probably already know the basic concept here. An action star on the skids (Stiller), a “serious” Australian actor (Robert Downey Jr.), and a broad comic (Jack Black) are in the Vietnamese jungle, making the film version of the memoirs of a tough-to-the-point-of-psycho vet (Nick Nolte). The latter convinces the novice director (Coogan), under pressure from a thuggish studio boss (an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise), to take them without crew on a trek through the jungle to generate some real fear in their performances. Unfortunately, local drug wholesalers think they’re DEA agents, and the danger becomes real.

Like “Hamlet 2,” this is a hybrid of a couple of concepts that aren’t exactly new — actors who don’t realize that they’re in a real situation; a plot that inevitably creates exactly the make-believe circumstances the hero is prepared for; movie stars rising above their petty vanity to become (if only briefly) the braver characters they are used to portraying. (If the last most readily evokes Peter O’Toole in “My Favorite Year,” let me put in a good word for Vincent Price’s similar turn in the sadly obscure 1951 Robert Mitchum film “His Kind of Woman.”)

And, as in “Hamlet 2,” many of the jokes and story developments are fairly obvious (though not nearly as many). The fake trailers at the beginning are hilarious, even though the gags are pretty easy.

Big-budget films like this are likelier to run off the rails than something like “Hamlet 2,” but the opposite is true here. The pacing is snappy; the story moves along coherently, with clockwork precision; little plot details all make sense.

It may be lame to say that the familiar elements here work better simply because the performers are good enough to sell them, but that’s a large part of it: Stiller is terrific, and Downey is somewhat better than terrific — inspired. The entire supporting cast delivers. The only weak spot is Black, whose character is more of a cartoon than the others.

“Tropic Thunder” really is hysterical; and it even manages, now and then, to surprise.