Hamlet 2

Starring Steve Coogan, Amy Poehler and Catherine Keener

FOR years now Steve Coogan, the award-winning actor who hails from a large Irish Catholic family in Manchester, has been a stadium-filling name in the comedy circuit in Ireland and England. Here in the U.S. he's best known as the man singer Courtney Love blames for actor Owen Wilson's sea of troubles, but the truth is there's far more to Coogan's talent than just knowing how to party.

Coogan stars in Hamlet 2, which opens nationwide on Friday. If the idea of writing a sequel to a Shakespeare play where the entire cast dies makes you smile, then this film is already on your must see list. The good news is that this oddball but undeniably funny film will easily surpass your expectations.

Coogan gives a rich and at times unsettling performance as Dana Marschz, a failed actor and now a failing drama coach at a Tucson Arizona high school. Passionate about his art but devoid of any actual talent, he's seething with thwarted ambition. He's also married to the increasingly frustrated Brie (played by a charismatic Catherine Keener) and can't recognize the warning signs all around him.

Watching Dana's outrageously bad amateur stage productions of popular films like Erin Brockovich is a treat, but other comedies like Waiting for Guffman have been over this ground before. Where Hamlet 2 really takes off is in Coogan's weirdly sincere, offbeat performance.

Completely at sea in life and in art, and suffering from an unresolved and traumatic relationship with his father, Coogan gives his luckless character a dignity that makes you root for him even as you laugh at his misfortunes.

Dana's life changing moment comes when he's challenged to write his own play rather than keep rehashing famous films on stage. After a wickedly funny creative struggle he conceives of a profanity filled sequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet, an edgy new project that enrages his conservative community and that makes his student actors fear for their lives (and their souls).

Facing threats from the school board over his blasphemous new work he finds unexpected support from ACLU attorney Cricket Feldstein (played by Amy Poehler at her gum chewing best), Dana has unexpectedly found the greatest challenge of his life, and he fights to protect his artistic vision no matter how outrageous (and frankly stupid) other people find it.

What keeps the film running isn't just the laughs, although there are plenty of them. Coogan invests real emotion into his performance and the script takes him to joltingly dark places.

Dana's wife takes a lover and abandons him. He falls off the wagon and returns to the alcoholism that once almost destroyed him, and we even learn of the parental sexual abuse that has haunted him all his life.

None of these elements are played for laughs - much - and so throughout the film there's a weird enduring tension between the scripts comedy and drama elements. If the point is to make the audience invest in the character then Coogan succeeds admirably, but it's unusual to laugh and cry at an American comedy and the unevenness is actually part of the point.

Hamlet 2 is unusual in one more regard. It's a comedy about forgiveness, but deep forgiveness for appalling wrongs.

When Dana's epic play is finally staged he prevents Shakespeare's characters from going to their doom the effect is hilarious and - again - deeply moving at the same time. I can't think of another recent comedy like it because there hasn't been a film this odd and this oddly affecting on a main screen in years.

Choosing the Arizona Gay Men's Chorus to sing Elton John's Someone Saved My Life Tonight as Coogan, playing Jesus, saves the day on stage is a masterstroke. It's hilarious and ironic and subversive and it just works.

Poehler's tough as nails civil liberties attorney is also one of the best elements in a script already crowded with incident. She's a wisecracking tough broad from the big city with a hidden but 24 carat heart, and Poehler shines in the role.

Hamlet 2 isn't for everyone, but it's on it's way to becoming a major cult hit.