The Phantom of the Opera

Despite the recent commercial success of Moulin Rouge and Chicago, movie musicals remain encumbered with the box office poison label. Studio chiefs with long enough memories might point to big-budget disasters Star! (1968), Doctor Doolittle (1967), and Darling Lili (1970), all of which were greenlit by executives thoroughly out of touch with the tastes of the growing counterculture. Studio chiefs with shorter memories (very likely the majority) might bring up the disastrous test-screening results of James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything (1994), which was eventually released with its songs excised, and Evita (1996). Should they be in need of another example, they need look no further than Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (2004). While the stage version of Phantom has captured the imagination of generations of theatergoers since its debut in 1986, the film adaptation may very well have the opposite effect. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Barbra Streisand CD – high production values, time-tested songs, but so painfully un-hip and full of itself that you can't help but cringe during the duration. The Phantom of the Opera may play well on the stage, where audiences are seated several feet away from the lead actors, but when director Joel Schumacher sweeps his camera in for one of his many close-ups, their melodramatic facial expressions can't help but seem over-the-top.

Compounding the problem is utter lack of charisma displayed by Gerard Butler, who plays the Phantom, and the hilariously inauthentic accents sported by the usually talented actresses Miranda Richardson and Minnie Driver (one hopes these two ladies were merely staging a not-so-silent protest against the film's overblown pomposity). Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson display appealing earnestness as the squeaky-clean lead characters, but Schumacher shoots them in a manner more befitting a soap opera than a feature film.

Given these disastrous circumstances, the best way to enjoy Phantom of the Opera is to surrender yourself to its awfulness and bask in its ridiculous glory. For instance, the scene where the Phantom first leads Christine (Rossum) into his lair cannot help but call to mind Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time" video. Other such moments are to be found, so long as you brace yourself for stretches of extreme boredom in between.