Frailty, thy name is “Hamlet 2.”

Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), a teacher with too few talents and too much passion, tries to save his cut drama program by writing a musical, non-linear, Freudian, pointlessly raunchy (“rape in the face” is a recurring theme), time-traveling, sequel to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

The movie would have done far better to stick with the absurd play and ax the remaining 90 percent of the film. Seems counter-intuitive until you see the filler around the play, which is pure contempt masquerading as feistiness.

Let’s start with the supposed location. Tucson, Arizona. There are so many funny ways one could dump on my hometown. The gated-community snowbirds determined to gulp down all the brown Colorado River water for their stupid pools and stupider golf courses. The Wildcat-emblazoned aspiring pornographers clogging the walkways at the University of Arizona. The trying-too-hard gutterpunks downtown with chunky, inky hair, and identical tribal-width stretched ears. The elitist tempeh and turquoise sprawl of pink that’s pushed all the knife-fighting and taco trucks past the swap meet side of town. The fact that the whole city sees Phoenix as a goal instead of a cautionary tale.

Instead, writer and director Andrew Fleming films in New Mexico and figures if he hangs enough bleached cow skulls on the walls and cast enough Hispanic teenagers and had Catherine Keener drink enough novelty-sized margaritas and snark, “Of course it’s hot/bright/sunny; it’s TUCSON!” enough times, we’d buy it.

Filmmakers who believe “no one will notice” should be, as the Bard said, hoisted with their own petard. No one will notice that a July monsoon comes in the spring? No one will notice that Burning Man, given as the reason for their rehearsal space’s emptiness, actually happens in late August, and not during a high school spring semester? No one will notice that we shot at Albuquerque’s Ski-Hi liquor store and not Lee’s Drive-In Liquor? No one could even be bothered to get some stock footage of the Tucson Inn sign? These things may seem piddling to those who believe fly-over country is deservedly ignored — let’s film a So-Cal movie in Houston and see what a palpable hit that is.

All of this really could be overlooked were it not for the utter lack of motivation the cast has. Keener, who plays the hateful, drunk, insulting wife, decides to get knocked up and run away with another character she’s spent the movie berating. Just as suddenly, after Coogan wastes his screen time not wearing pants, flashing his twigs and berries in a kaftan, clumsily roller-skating and passing out in a field tripping on acid, his slacker students rise up to support him and his theatrical production.

One parent, who protested the subject matter (less the “group sex” scenes involving Hillary Clinton than the destruction of classic tragedy) remarks, “I’m simultaneously horrified and fascinated.”

Apart from a cool, but very brief pastiche of scenes from the play, including a gay men’s chorus singing “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” while Hamlet and Laertes light-saber duel hanging from wires, I don’t get the fascination part. As Shakespeare himself said, “it smells to heaven.”

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.