Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is still the resentful, suspicious brooder we expect, though we find him not as an offended heir but a totally incognito outsider from his family's power network. The swift marriage of Gertrude ( The Insider's Diane Venora) to Claudius, her brother-in-law, represents in the new setting a kind of corporate merger: there is less of a sense here than in the play that Claudius had to marry Gertrude to rise professionally. I won't recount the well-known particulars of the story here, but rest assured that Almereyda preserves most of them, even when the new context affects how we understand them. The first is to update the story to the milieu of modern New York City, where the titanic, fictional Denmark Corporation has recently lost its CEO and 'king' and passed intoor, as centuries of readers have discovered, may have been quite actively grabbed bythe hands of Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), the late tycoon's brother. This Hamlet, which begins with a shot of the Manhattan skyline as seen through the sunroof of a car, takes three primary risks. Director Almereyda and his collaborators have made an uneven but highly interesting picture, one in which they all commendably practice what the screenplay preaches. The chief lesson Hamlet must learn during this story is to take action even when success and safety are not guaranteed. Almereyda's film makes almost every kind of gaffe, from entire scenes that seem dramatically misconceived to three separate entrances of the boom mike into the top of a framedidn't anyone think to wake up the grips? Nonetheless, these mistakes are generally the hallmark of an ambitious, difficult project though some of the risks do not pay off, many of them do, and so I liked this film better than Zeffirelli's and Branagh's far more conventional takes on the play.

Michael Almereyda's Hamlet has more flubs and inconsistencies than either of the major film adaptations produced in the last decade: the 1990 Franco Zeffirelli-Mel Gibson project and the four-hour Kenneth Branagh extravaganza from 1996.

Screenplay: Michael Almereyda (based on the play by William Shakespeare). Cast: Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Julia Stiles, Bill Murray, Liev Schreiber, Karl Geary, Steve Zahn.

Hamlet full movie 2000