Hamlet 2

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Hamlet 2 is a 2008 comedic film starring Steve Coogan as high school drama teacher Dana Marschz. His big idea is to write the "sequel" to the play Hamlet to restore his Tucson high school's drama department, complete with the showstopping musical number "Rock Me Sexy Jesus."

Tropes used in Hamlet 2 include:

• Ambiguously Gay: Rand
• Adam Westing: Elizabeth Shue, having quit show business and become a nurse.
• Anachronism Stew: Done on purpose.^[context?]
• Boredom Montage: Coupled with Hard Work Montage when Dana tries to write the play.
• The Chew Toy: Poor Yolanda, who gets injured in almost all of the scenes she appears onscreen
• Captain Obvious: Gary.
• Creator Breakdown: In-universe; in writing the play Dana is essentially mangling together Christianity, Hamlet, time-travel and his daddy issues.
• Fix Fic: The play is essentially this for Hamlet, considering in the end he uses Jesus's time machine to prevent the deaths of his loved ones.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Cricket gets knocked over at the play and threatens to sue everyone.
• Freudian Excuse: The principal.^[context?]
• Freudian Slip: At one point, Dana calls the principal "Daddy" and screams about how he never believed in him. While they're arguing about something else entirely.
• Giftedly Bad: The entire show. Dana learns to accept this
• Jesus Was Way Cool: "Rock Me Sexy Jesus".
• Law of Inverse Fertility^[context?]
• Mushroom Samba: Some of the students slip acid into Dana's iced tea early in the film. He wakes up on an abandoned couch minus his pants.
• Off the Wagon: As part of Dana's Darkest Hour sequence.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Steve Coogan's natural English accent comes through quite a bit.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: In-Universe, the titular play crosses so many lines that the protest lands it a Broadway run.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Cricket Feldstein as a positive example. She uses her knowledge of various laws to keep the show from being shut down.
• Refuge in Audacity: The whole play pretty much runs on this:
  • One of the earlier ads was simply the name of the film, with a voiceover which says "We apologize to the following groups this film may offend": It then proceeds to list everyone.
• The Rival: in a parody of this trope, Mr. Marschz' rival is the school paper's drama critic, a kid who looks like he's 13.
• Running Gag: No one is able to pronounce Mr. Marschz' name correctly.
  • Yolanda getting hit in the face with something.
• Save Our Students: The film is a parody of the "inspirational teacher" genre, mainly by making the teacher a pretentious blowhard and the needy kids actually pretty bright (at least some of them).
  • One scene has Octavio, a Latino student, telling Mr. Marschz that his parents won't let him do the play. Mr. Marschz proceeds to go to "the barrio" to talk them out of their "ethnic narrow-mindedness," and then pans out to show that Octavio's parents have an enormous house, with his father being an accomplished novelist and his mother a painter, Octavio himself having a 3.9 GPA and early acceptance to Brown, and that their disapproval of the play is not that it's artistic but that it's badly written
• Shout-Out: Lampshaded:

Elizabeth Shue: He's doing the Crane!

• Small Town Boredom: Tucson isn't really small, but given it's described as the place where dreams go to die in the opening monologue...
• Stylistic Suck: "Hamlet 2".^[context?]
• Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: One of the opening commercials has Dana playing one of these.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Dana apparently has something like this going on with his own father, and has adopted the school's principal as something of a warped substitute.
• The Voiceless: Yolanda. She finally talks near the end and gives the hungover and depressed Dana a Get a Hold of Yourself, Man! / Reason You Suck Speech.