Almereyda pares the drama down to its bloody core, leaving a potent tale of despair, madness and loss.
Comment
07/06/08
Hamlet (2000)
51 %
Reviews Counted: 79 Fresh: 40 Rotten:39 Average Rating: 5.5/10
Consensus:
Stiff performances fail to produce any tension onscreen.
Runtime: 1 hr 52 mins
Synopsis: Ethan Hawke stars in this modern update of Shakespeare's classic play. He portrays a young filmmaker in New York City who struggles to gain power of his deceased father's company, even as the new boss (Kyle MacLachlan) manages to take total control of the proceedings. Michael Almereyda's... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Bill Murray
Director: Michael Almereyda
Story: William Shakespeare
Producer: Andrew Fierberg, Amy Hobby
Composer: Carter Burwell
Story: William Shakespeare
Producer: Andrew Fierberg, Amy Hobby
Composer: Carter Burwell
Reviews
Top Critic
Almereyda modernises and streamlines without trivializing, and amplifies poetic melodrama with regular ingenuity and energy.
06/03/06
Top Critic
[This is] an imaginative and exciting update, lacking only the decent swordfight the ending demands.
06/03/06
Visually the film is riveting, using the setting with real style and emotion.
12/10/01
Top Critic
Instead of being a companion to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo And Juliet (1996) , this can be filed under wasted opportunities.
03/08/01
Top Critic
It could prove almost as definitive -- and far more easily digestible -- than Branagh's textually complete version.
07/06/08
Top Critic
The movie is almost playful in its mission to burrow around inside Hamlet and discover what's still relevant about it.
09/17/07
The lines are read for the most part with more feeling for the angry-stepchild plot than for the iambic pentameter.
04/27/07
The city becomes a living emblem of the tense coexistence of art and corporatism, an uneasy relationship which Almereyda emphasizes as the core conflict of his picture.
06/03/06
In a sense, it's B-movie Shakespeare, the same as Orson Welles' inspired version of Macbeth (1948), which was produced on a skimpy budget for a B-picture studio.
05/26/04
Hamlet is supposed to be melancholy, but Hawke plays him as a disturbed loner who is more likely to infect the world's computers with an e-mail virus than avenge his father's murder.
06/06/03
Consider it a primer for Kenneth Branagh's four and a half hour Hamlet opus.
04/19/03
Icy-cold in its palette and unwaveringly cool in its application of modern settings and gizmos to a text that stands up to endless reinvention, this is a Hamlet that brings imagination matched by thoughtfulness to its appeal to both eye and ear.
04/11/02
The result is more than a mere gimmick and less than an unqualifed success, but yes -- it's always watchable.
03/19/02
A disappointment because it failed to peak my interest like Baz Luhrman's Romeo & Juliet did.
11/03/01
What dooms this Hamlet to mediocrity is the quality of the acting, especially in the leads, and the general slowness and turgidity of the proceedings.
10/30/01
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good movie
by: DanaBug 2/2/01
by: DanaBug 2/2/01
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