Arnold doing “To be or not to be” with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a .44 in his hand is the most honest fucking Shakespeare you’re ever going to see.
You want purity? You want authenticity? Go watch some Yale Drama School graduate emote at you for three hours. What Schwarzenegger and that insane, self-immolating carnival ride of a movie understood, what they got in their bones, was that Hamlet’s always been about a guy who can’t stop thinking long enough to actually fucking do anything, and the only way to make that digestible for a mall-walking, popcorn-munching audience in 1993 was to have the Austrian Oak blow away Claudius mid-soliloquy.
Because that’s the whole sick joke, isn’t it? I know it’s absurd. The movie knows I know. Arnold knows I know he knows. It’s this infinite regression of self-awareness, like staring into mirrors facing each other until your brain melts out your ears, and somewhere in that funhouse reflection is something true about how we consume our mythology now… pre-packaged, self-referential, winking at itself so hard it’s practically having a seizure.
Arnold, God bless him, commits completely. He’s not slumming. He’s not apologizing. He is Hamlet, if Hamlet could bench-press a Buick.