Who would have thought it? A Joel Schumacher film of an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical is apparently a turd!
God, I hate musicals, and Schumacher really is the Demon of Hack made flesh, so I may be a tiny little bit biased against this film.
This is a funny review by Peter Bradshaw though:
After Christine's triumph, the Phantom conducts her to his crepuscular pad, accessible via a boat ride across a Stygian waterway and down, down, down to his hellish habitat. Here he allows her to swoon, temporarily, on what appears to be a marital bed modelled on a full-winged swan. There is nothing ghostly about the right old rogering that the Phantom hopes one day to give her. But hasn't he, in some ghastly metaphorical sense, already violated her innocence? Isn't he simply a Luciferian figure, a fallen angel of music who compels the innocent Christine into a Satanic pact, buying her soul and letting her become the toast of Paris? The sheer nastiness of the Phantom is compounded by the way he encourages Christine to think of him as the image of her late father, adding quasi-incest to his misdemeanours.
Lloyd Webber's movie evokes all these ideas, only to immerse them in the sugary bombast of his music - complemented by Schumacher's dull direction and the truly horrible Franklin Mint production design. The Phantom is just a sad, sweet, plain boy who's in love with the prettiest girl in the class, and can express his feelings in only one way: by singing the most cloying music in the world, skipping down major scales and all too often hopping up a supercilious octave for the final no-o-o-o-o-o-te.
God, I hate musicals, and Schumacher really is the Demon of Hack made flesh, so I may be a tiny little bit biased against this film.
This is a funny review by Peter Bradshaw though:
After Christine's triumph, the Phantom conducts her to his crepuscular pad, accessible via a boat ride across a Stygian waterway and down, down, down to his hellish habitat. Here he allows her to swoon, temporarily, on what appears to be a marital bed modelled on a full-winged swan. There is nothing ghostly about the right old rogering that the Phantom hopes one day to give her. But hasn't he, in some ghastly metaphorical sense, already violated her innocence? Isn't he simply a Luciferian figure, a fallen angel of music who compels the innocent Christine into a Satanic pact, buying her soul and letting her become the toast of Paris? The sheer nastiness of the Phantom is compounded by the way he encourages Christine to think of him as the image of her late father, adding quasi-incest to his misdemeanours.
Lloyd Webber's movie evokes all these ideas, only to immerse them in the sugary bombast of his music - complemented by Schumacher's dull direction and the truly horrible Franklin Mint production design. The Phantom is just a sad, sweet, plain boy who's in love with the prettiest girl in the class, and can express his feelings in only one way: by singing the most cloying music in the world, skipping down major scales and all too often hopping up a supercilious octave for the final no-o-o-o-o-o-te.
