Aarcflick

However, movies that take place inside a video game while being played by real players is a genre that, right now, consists mostly of Knit’s Island and 2024’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. To that short list we can add co-directors Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, a hilarious and even moving chronicle of the COVID era that follows two out-of-work British actors dealing with the loneliness and creative boredom of lockdown by putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto Online. The film boils down 300 hours of GTA Online gameplay to a tight 91 minutes in which Crane and fellow out-of-work actor Mark Oosterveen walk, run, drive, fly, punch, and shoot their way through the game’s crime-infested version of Los Angeles while recruiting a troupe of willing GTA Online players to take part in this unusual staging of the Bard’s most famous play. Grylls and Crane laugh heartily at the disconnect between Shakespeare’s immortal wo...