Most critics lean warm on Michael Almereyda’s decision to move the play to corporate Manhattan, with the first American notices the most enthusiastic. Praise clusters on the setting itself: the city treated as a character, the surveillance cameras and video diaries that lend the prince his paranoia, and the way modern trappings make familiar lines sound new. The supporting cast is the other point of agreement, Bill Murray’s Polonius and Julia Stiles’s Ophelia singled out even by reviewers who like little else.
The reservations gather around Ethan Hawke. Several reviews find his slacker prince too passive to hold the centre, and the harsher notices say much of the cast cannot speak the verse. Others feel the cutting truncates the story, blunts its political edge and never reaches tragic weight. The spread is wide, from the Los Angeles Times’s near-rave to Total Film calling it tedious and crass, with the later British reviews markedly cooler than the American ones.