Hamlet: Critic Reviews

Although the movies haven't lacked for Hamlets recently, Ethan Hawke and Kenneth Branagh being the latest stars to have weighed in, Mr. Scott's is something that must be seen.

This is one Hamlet that was not meant to be.

By equating the garish feudalism of the play's original setting with the megalopolis of today's New York, [Almereyda is] at least on the right track. The problem is, it's just about his only track.

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.

The lines are read for the most part with more feeling for the angry-stepchild plot than for the iambic pentameter.

It could prove almost as definitive -- and far more easily digestible -- than Branagh's textually complete version.

Intelligent, well-acted, all-American version of the Shakespeare tragedy.

Embarrassingly sophomoric.

The result is more than a mere gimmick and less than an unqualifed success, but yes -- it's always watchable.

Almereyda has pulled off a formidable coup: He's made Shakespeare come alive for contemporary audiences of all ages, especially young people.

2000 version of Hamlet is just dreadful.

Almereyda pares the drama down to its bloody core, leaving a potent tale of despair, madness and loss.

The movie is almost playful in its mission to burrow around inside Hamlet and discover what's still relevant about it.

[This is] an imaginative and exciting update, lacking only the decent swordfight the ending demands.

I guess Johnny Depp was busy, so they got the one that can't act.

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.

No, Ethan Hawke can't do Shakespeare.

Almereyda modernises and streamlines without trivializing, and amplifies poetic melodrama with regular ingenuity and energy.

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.

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.

Consider it a primer for Kenneth Branagh's four and a half hour Hamlet opus.

Fear not. This Bard is anything but boring!