It’s tough to write a review for a film like Hamlet.  You can’t touch the story, so critics are basically left to drone on about the acting and the adaptation, if it is done in some unusual manner.  In the last ten years, we’ve already had the run-of-the-mill Hamlet with Mel Gibson, an unabridged Hamlet with Kenneth Branagh, and now we get Hamlet set in present-day New York City.

This interesting version of Shakespeare’s drama is probably more akin to Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 update of Romeo + Juliet than it is to either Gibson’s or Branagh’s renderings.  Both were adapted and directed by independent filmmakers (Michael Almereyda, Trance) and both placed its characters in contemporary settings while keeping the Bard's language.  Like Romeo + Juliet, Hamlet uses a television news anchor as the story’s narrator, and we also see clever management of modern devices like faxes, laptop computers, cell phones, airplanes and video cameras, all of which seem to blend seamlessly into a story that’s over four hundred years old.

Here, Hamlet (Ethan Hawke, Snow Falling on Cedars) is dark, brooding and perpetually filming everything with his digital video camera - so he’s pretty much Wes Bentley in American Beauty.  He returns home from school for his father’s funeral and wants to return immediately to his studies rather than watch mother Gertrude (Diane Venora, The Insider) go at it with her new husband, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan, Timecode), who has just become the new CEO of Denmark Corporation.  But when he’s visited by his father’s ghost (Sam Shepard, Snow Falling on Cedars), Hamlet decides instead to stick around and go crazy, dragging the comely photographer Ophelia (Julia Stiles, Down to You) into madness with him.

The rest of Hamlet proceeds as you would expect, with large chunks missing here and there (it would be four hours long otherwise).  The play-within-the-play becomes a clever movie-within-the-movie, even though it’s still called “Mouse Trap.”  Rosencrantz (Steve Zahn, Happy, Texas) and Guildenstern (Dechen Thurman, Uma’s brother) are as bumbling as ever.  And Almereyda evens manages to work in things like MovieFone recordings and those annoying celebrity messages telling you to buckle up while you’re riding in New York City taxicabs.

While the acting is quite commendable – Hawke is especially surprising – Hamlet suffers from some painfully slow parts.  But if you’re familiar with the story, you know things are going to get a lot more interesting. The film looks terrific, and features work from American Psycho production and set designers Gideon Ponte and Jeanne Develle, and handsome photography by John de Borman (Hideous Kinky).

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