Grand Theft Hamlet

 Years ago, when I was addicted to playing the computer game, Doom, I read about people who had mastered play to the extent that they could "do a Gandhi".  This meant darting through the digital labyrinths infested with fire demons and goblins without killing a single adversary.  Apparently, if you were skilled enough, you  could defeat the murderous purpose of the game -- it was a first-person shooter -- and run through all levels without ever firing your weapon.  There are apparently idiosyncratic and ingenious ways to approach digital gaming not self-evident to the casual player.  Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), a 90 minute movie entirely filmed within the atmospheric landscapes of "Grand Theft Auto", a famous video game, represents an extreme (and, apparently, very difficult) appropriation of the grungy, hard-boiled characters and brilliantly sleazy locations featured in game.  Two players decide to stage an abbreviated, but, nonetheless, substantial version of Shakespeare's Hamlet using the game and its avatar-characters as their platform.  It's a gimmick and, most likely, the virtuosic aspects of this endeavor were lost on me -- I've never played the game.  But the movie is mildly entertaining and has some emotionally effective moments.  

Two actors, Sam and Mark, are out-of-work -- the theaters are shuttered due to the Covid pandemic.  To pass the time, they are obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto ("GTA" as it often called in the movie).  GTA is a multi-player game in which characters, inhabiting exotic avatars -- space aliens, knights in armor, big-breasted hookers -- interact, mostly violently by kicking each other to death or gunning other players down.  After crashing some cars and running from police chasing them with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, Sam and Mark come upon a sylvan glen where there is a big amphitheater -- they take advantage of the setting by trying out some soliloquies from Shakespeare (mostly from Macbeth) before getting clubbed to death by other players.  This inspires Sam and Mark to recruit players to play roles in Hamlet which they intend to stage entirely on locations, and with characters in GTA.  The first third of the film involves recruiting players to perform in the show.  This turns out to be very difficult -- as someone says the Venn diagram showing the intersection between enthusiasts of GTA, a violent, amoral, nihilistic game, and Shakespeare is a vanishingly slender sliver.  Nonetheless, after lots of bloody confrontations (the pavements and floors in the game are always puddled with blood), Mark and Sam doing manage to put together a cast willing to perform the play -- some of the actors are a bit unreliable, including a figure who appears as a strutting naked alien with bare buttocks and who has the tendency to either vanish unpredictably or kill everyone else on location.  The second and longest part of the film shows rehearsals staged at various locations with the landscapes and sordid interiors presented by the game.  In the last ten minutes, we see excerpts of the play as actually presented.  There is a short epilogue in which the characters say goodbye to one another by engaging in a shoot-out blood bath that leaves everyone gory and "wasted" as the game describes it. (Revived, they go to a bar to dance the night away.)  During the closing credits, we see the actual players at an awards  ceremony at the Royal Theater on Drury Lane where Mark, Sam, and Pinny Grylls (Sam's wife and one of the directors of the show) are given a prize for their successful Shakespearian adaptation.  This is the only glimpse we get of live people and its unassuming, apparently shot on a cell-phone. Needless to say, the rather mousy actors and actresses bear no resemblance to their heroic, square-jawed counterparts in the game, big muscular brutes who stalk around, moving back and forth in a seemingly random way, and women with big breasts toting machine guns and machete knives.  

The rehearsals are afflicted by many set-backs.  In some respects, the film has the logic and character of an old Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland comedy -- a bunch of enthusiastic kids get together to put on a show.  At first, random interlopers obstruct their rehearsals by killing everyone.  During casting, trolls show up, infiltrate the production, but, then, refuse to speak, undermine the show, and, of course, once again murder everyone in sight.  There's one guy, named Dipo (everyone uses pseudonyms in the game) who claims to be half-Finn and half-Tunisian, who is very talented actor.  But, midway through the film, the Covid lock-down ends and he gets a job -- he can no longer play Hamlet but is now relegated to a minor role.  Pinny, who is directing the show (from her tough gangster moll persona) and Sam have marital problems.  Sam is obsessively scouting locations in the game and not spending enough time with his wife and kids.  They fight but make-up.  The actual production of Hamlet at the end also poses some problems.  The appearance of the Ghost (Hamlet's murdered father) is staged for some reason on huge airship, a big blimp, and people keep falling off of it.  During the show, the blimp crashes and everyone dies, of course, only to be brought to life.  The audience has to be ferried by speed boat to a floating casino where some of the action is staged.  During the ride over the waves, Horatio gets knocked into the water and drowns.  The action zips all over the apparently enormous cityscape of Los Santos, a stand-in for LA, and the "to be or not to be soliloquy" is tried out in various settings, including a spectacularly seedy dive-bar full of morose, depressed drunks and hookers and a small embattled rock in the middle of a raging sea.  (In general, the landscapes in GTA are incredible, immensely detailed, and, often, beautiful lit -- some of the vacant lots and dumping grounds around Los Santos have a dewy luminous presence that reminds me of paintings by George Innes.  The characters have to be in perpetual motion, but most of it is completely pointless, pacing back and forth or circling one another, and all of the figures have dead, inert eyes.  Their lips move randomly but don't match the words that they are speaking.  Helicopters hover overhead and, sometimes, characters jet around in planes.  From time to time, there are motor vehicle crashes.  Of course, it is all staggeringly violent:  characters burst into flames and are incinerated, others are vaporized by rocket-propelled grenades, run over by cars, riddled with machine gun bullets by the cops and people randomly bludgeon one another, hack each other apart, or fall from immense heights exploding into moist clumps of blood when they land on the ground.  Someone says that the mayhem is perfectly appropriate for Shakespeare -- 'it's a mix of unearthly beauty and savage murder.'  I don't exactly get the point of this movie, an amusement devised during co-vid and, apparently, representing an enormous expenditure of time.  I thought the picture was reasonably compelling and the landscapes incredibly impressive.  My wife couldn't stand more than ten minutes.