Now it’s very possible that I was just in a bad place watching this, because I’m seeing a lot of very high scores for this film and I just can’t relate.

I mean, intellectually I understand that it’s a significant achievement to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online and I understand intellectually that the juxtaposition is supposed to be hilarious. But something about this film rubbed me the wrong way. What I saw was a pair of charmless craic vacuums with no understanding of the medium latching onto a cheap gimmick that would have worked better as a series of TikTok clips instead of a full movie where everything feels contrived and inauthentic (the soliloquys were delivered more believably than a lot of the supposedly natural dialogue, like the “oh what do we have here?” finding the theatre at the beginning).

It also doesn’t help that the film is stuck between a rock and hard place ‐ viewers need a certain level of fluency with the game to be able to understand what’s going on, especially considering how disjointedly the whole thing has been put together. But on the other hand, too much fluency and you realise how much of the game’s bonkers anarchy has been left on the table, and how anaemic and dull the end result is.

God bless Parteb, the agent of chaos in the whole thing ‐ the true spirit of GTA:O ‐ and the only thing that made me laugh in the whole movie.

Even more disappointingly, there’s another story here: two out-of-work actors during lockdown, struggling to find work, struggling mentally and emotionally. They finally find a project to keep them occupied, to keep them connected with other people and get them some industry recognition. A better film would have spent some time interrogating this but for the most part it’s completely ignored in Grand Theft Hamlet.

A hugely missed opportunity. Disappointing.