Hamlet (2000)
Chicolini: “I object.”
Prosecutor: “You object! On what grounds?”
Chicolini: “I couldn’t think of anything else to say.” - Duck Soup
It has been said of Olivier that he could speak Shakespeare’s lines as naturally as if he were “actually thinking them”. Charmingly put. Yet there is not a single actor in the whole of this Hamlet to whom even such faint praise as this is due. The deliveries of the senior actors are professional, polished but synthetic, false as plastic posies; the junior members of the cast speak slowly and flatly, as if quoting from half-memory something they kinda sorta remember seeing on MTV this one time but they were too bored to watch it. What results is an odd interpretation and a bad Hamlet, but an interesting social document. There is a certain sense in which Hamlet can be interpreted as a tale of disaffected youth, and in this it is especially apposite to our times, out of joint as they are; the transposition of Hamlet’s “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy so that he compares himself not a 
anonymous ‘player’ but to images of James Dean is an extension of this idea, but makes one wonder why so many movies nowadays openly invite comparisons with classics which cannot help but make them seem even worse than they are. There is nothing of James Dean’s rage and hurt and helplessness in this Hamlet; and yet this Hamlet is of an age and, like that age, he is petulant and whiny and insincere, preciously preserving himself from a rotten world by viewing it through a camera lens, spoilt and smirking, sneering and condemning but balking entirely at the opportunity of actually putting something right. Claudius and Polonious and the rest speak in pre-rehearsed, media-friendly soundbites because they are important public figures, and diplomacy and tact are the tools of their trade; their dialogue is essentially empty because it is driven by the purposes of rhetoric and effect, but Hamlet’s words are empty simply because he is. It would be easy to say that Hamlet is the pure spirit of the age, but this would be misleading; he is zeitgeist of a zeit which has no geist to speak of, pure negation. Even Claudius’s murder of his own brother is more life-affirming than Hamlet’s self-serving stance of perennial observer, in so far as he does what he does in order to actualise some real desire. This Hamlet is already well and truly bounded in the little nutshell of his mind; and let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere else.
As an interpretation of Hamlet, this movie is almost entirely worthless; but as an unwitting parable of today, of spoilt, shilly-shallying, so-called ‘liberalism’ standing stock-still in the face of evil and refusing to play by anything but its own rules, it is bizarrely and terrifyingly effective.