One Prince of Demark is as good as another I suppose…

While the world wasn’t exactly clamouring for yet another adaptation of one of the Bard’s most iconic works, there’s a reserved class and sleek sheen to this Hamlet that allows it some moments to shine.

When Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) returns to London’s elite South Asian community for his father’s funeral, he is stunned to discover his uncle Claudius is marrying his newly widowed mother. Visited by his father’s ghost, Hamlet learns his brutal murder was at the hands of Claudius – and spirals into a quest for vengeance that exposes the rot at the heart of the family’s empire and threatens his own sanity.

I don’t think I’m alone in admitting that getting interested in material that has been adapted for the screen at a pace that takes it well into the double digits is not the easiest task.  That being said, this Hamlet has a fresh layer to it as it transposes the story into the realm of an affluent family living in modern day London that makes it pop, especially thanks to a very solid leading performance.

This isn’t the first time that writer Michael Lessie has adapted the Bard for the big screen (see Macbeth back in 2015) and that ultimately serves it all well allowing for a layer of insidiousness and grime to exist in the words even when they all get a little flowery at times.  It’s a solid adaptation for the big screen because it successfully keeps the words the same but the dialogue subtly different.   It’s not a beat for beat adaptation as it does takes some slight liberties but not enough that you’d actually care if you’re a devotee to the works of Shakespeare

Here on his second feature, director Aneil Karia actually manages to shoot this somewhere in between the styles of Michael Mann and Daniel Boyle has he uses the backdrop of London to his benefit.  Karia knows how to make it all look good and has even won an Oscar for best short film back in 2022 with his star and friend Riz Ahmed so while we can’t wait to see what might be next in store for him, there’s too much here that felt “safe:” no matter how well Ahmed does in the role.

Riz Ahmed is one of those actors who is consistently over looked or taken for granted as he can carry an audience’s attention mostly by himself.  He does that and then some here as his interpretation of Hamlet is actually a pretty nice take on it all.  Playing the role less petulantly then has been done in years pass; Ahmed takes the role and turns into something that plays more of a man seething for revenge that has ultimately driven him mad.   It’s a darn good performance and he deserves more.

Sadly no one else in the ensemble had much of a chance to really do anything, Joe Alwyn as Laertes kind of bleeds into the background, Art Malik as Claudius seems less evil then we’re used to while Sheeba Chaddha as Gerturde under plays it all and Morfyrdd Clark as Ophelia plays her a little too much like a wilting willow then on the brink of insanity.  Only Timothy Spall as Polonius gets to add a little bit of a snicker and crooked smile to his performance and he plays well off of Ahmed’s Hamlet.

At the end of the day, there are legitimately somethings about this adaptation of Hamlet that are worth celebrating but many of them would have been better spent on an original piece of intellectual property.  It’s….fine; I’m just not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.