As much as I loathe marketing and advertising in all its forms, I must admit the folks being paid to drum up interest in the movie Hamlet 2 have done a good job — they picked one relatively small aspect of the film that was likely to really piss off the religious nuts enough to start rattling their sabers, and they highlighted that part in most of the trailers.

The “offensive bit” itself — the song Rock Me, Sexy Jesus — occupies a whopping 3 minutes of the movie’s running time, and isn’t the dirty, innuendo-laden shot across Christianity’s bow you expect given the title. In fact, within the movie, it’s more a song of praise than of insult, and I’m laughing my ass off at the folks claiming the film is blasphemous. You can immediately identify anyone who hasn’t actually seen the movie: anyone who is pissed about Rock Me, Sexy Jesus and doesn’t mention a thing about Raped in the Face is a mindless tool just parroting the criticisms s/he’s overheard from other wankers that haven’t seen the movie.

The song appears during the performance of the titular play, a sequel to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the lead character doesn’t die, but is instead rescued by Jesus and his time machine; he then goes back in time to save everybody that would otherwise croak at the end of Hamlet. As the play’s author reckons — doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?

The play is stupid. That’s the point. It’s aiming for “so stupid it’s funny” or “so bad it’s good” territory, and it hits the mark; amidst the insanity of the show itself is a strangely impressive message about forgiveness. Yes, the movie takes some jabs at the kind of people who typically protest/boycott movies like these, and bluntly, those people deserve it. When you don’t like some performance, movie, song, or writing, that’s fine; you’re even welcome to complain about it. It’s when you try to stop it being published and distributed, though, you’ve crossed the line. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head or forcing this stuff down your throat. Switch off your television (or change channels), close that book, take out the CD, and move on. Forcing your opinions or beliefs on others is crap, and always has been, and that’s why you deserve the ridicule you get.

The rest of the movie is quirky and funny throughout; the usual dull pacing most comedies acquire in their final half hour isn’t present here. I’m not entirely able to explain exactly why this is, but for Shannon and I the single funniest moment of the movie comes from an unexpected spot in the middle of the film: the protagonist has just started trying to write his new groundbreaking play, and has just suffered his first dose of writer’s block. He’s shown trying various things to shake the block, but ultimately he ends up staring at his computer. That’s when we meet his cat — it’s just calmly sitting there watching him. Then we notice he’s staring back at the cat. Finally, he looks straight at it and asks “what is your fucking problem?” in a slow, exacerbated voice. We laughed for 2 minutes straight after that, and even now as I recall the scene I’m chuckling enough that I worry I might awaken my buddy who’s asleep on the couch next to me.

The movie gives the classic lesson that, despite being taught and demonstrated over and over, never seems to be heard by the assholes that long to censor everything they hate: the more you complain about a movie, song, book, or blog, the more attention it ultimately gets and the more widely distributed it ends up. If you morons would quit whining about blasphemous movies, they wouldn’t do as well. But thanks to dipshits actually calling for a boycott of this comedy, more people ended up in the theaters to see it this week.

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