Grand Theft Hamlet Review

There’s something quaint about trying to produce a play within a game designed to encourage depravity. The world of Grand Theft Auto Online is meant to be experienced surrounded by a persistent hail of gunfire, as you carry out heists with associates you’ll inevitably stab in the back before setting out on your own to rack up rewards for slaughtering as many civilians as you can. It is charming that simply stumbling across a stage ignited the desire within Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen to figure out how to put on a production of Shakespeare. It was absurd to think they’d ever be able to wrangle a crew made up of strangers, in no small part because it required getting close enough to passersby without them opening fire. Yet with a sense of joy and determination, and with nothing better to do until the most recent COVID lockdown lifts, they hurl themselves into the task with often hilarious results.

As the movie’s title will inform you, they settle on Hamlet. Maybe it’s as simple as Sam easily reciting the “To be or not to be” speech, or maybe it’s the blood-soaked ending making the violence that surrounds (and befalls) them feel more appropriate. But we’re along for the ride as they slowly begin to lose themselves more and more deeply in their self-imposed Sisyphean torment. The limitations of the game and its emotes and costumes and lack of precise movements are all part of the point: they’ve no illusions this will be a particularly good staging, but as long as everyone involved has fun (including themselves), then it’s a success.

What somewhat complicates that seemingly pure design is the inclusion of documentarian (and Sam’s wife) Pinny Grylls from conception, especially since she’s introduced by her profession. It gives the film a dual nature: while a labor of love born of boredom and frustration and isolation, it signals an intention to make it into something more, a manifestation of the modern desire to turn one’s entire life into “content”. If you assume they’d always intended to stream it on Twitch (which isn’t mentioned but seems reasonable), then of course you’d want outside involvement to capture the action and choose the locations and such properly. And it’s also reasonable that surrounded by such chaos, you’d want that involvement to start early to ensure the highest chance of success. But Pinny’s presence at cast auditions and all the in-between times leaves this nagging feeling of showmanship at the back of your mind.

It’s hard to say if that’s the reason so many of the film’s dramatic moments feel staged (ahem). Most of the runtime is concerned with Sam and Mark’s struggles to get the thing made while fighting an environment that was not designed for it. There’s a lot of horsing around and banter and brainstorming and normal GTA stuff, scored by the most banal chatter you can imagine, just like when you and your friends game together. But now and then, the real world pushes in, presenting us with the promise of tying their experience to some greater point. It’s Dipo dropping out because he got a time-consuming real job, Sam and Pinny having a spat about his obsession, and Mark’s earnest plea about how this means so much to him in part because of how alone he’s been for the past year. All of these are real human moments, heartbreaking in their own ways, and incredibly relatable.

However, they all come across as so…fake. They’re all too measured and controlled, involving none of the raw emotion that so many of us experienced in those difficult years. It’s as if these conversations happened off-camera or even out of the game, and they decided they needed it to be in the movie, so they re-enacted them with their avatars and voice chat. They come up with little prompting, little prior indication of their existence beneath each person’s digital skin, only to quickly vanish to never be referenced again, having left little impact on the story, rendering them incomplete character arcs. The subject of each moment is the stock struggles of the pandemic, making for the paradox that being too recognizable makes them feel less authentic. All of which turned what should have been heartfelt situations into more of a slog.

As such, even the connective tissue started to feel flat and trite after a bit, as entertaining as it was. I found myself getting impatient, desperately wanting to see their final production, frustrated that for each minute spent on “behind-the-scenes” footage, we’d be spending one less minute time with the play itself. Sure enough, we only see the final performance in small snippets, greatly lessening the impact of the preparation in which we were immersed. Granted, there are some entertaining surprises it has in store for the viewer which are decidedly not planned, building on the charm present throughout the whole movie. But without any way to watch the play from start to finish, it lands awkwardly as a making-of-documentary for something that doesn’t exist.