Listen: SAVE YOURSELF!

Rating: 5/10 (13 January 2007)

I am a college student who finds himself lost in a shuffle of homework and deadlines, struggling to make grades that will be "good enough" for my parents while maintaining some semblance of a social life. So on MY Friday night, I had the opportunity to go and see a movie with a friend of mine. She wanted to see Dreamgirls and seeing as how she is the one with the car, I had no obligation. Thus, rather than seeing something that is probably masterfully written and thought provoking like Children of Men, I found myself sitting in the theatre watching a musical on the big screen.
I will admit that I am a little biased to putting musicals where they belong, and that is on the stage and not on the big screen. I will admit I wasn't THRILLED to see it, so I had my doubts and reservations going into the theatre. HOWEVER, I was excited to see Eddie Murphey sing his lungs out and perform in a serious role, something that I haven't had the opportunity to see a lot of.
This film was average. The only reason it even gets an AVERAGE status is because of the editing process and the acting that was done by Murphey, Foxx, Robinson and Hudson.
Sitting in the theatre I felt like the film climaxed in forty minutes. Twenty minutes later I was still sitting in my seat feeling like the plot wasn't even moving. I stopped caring about the characters, and I still don't know how the three original dreamettes came to be friends, and frankly they all become snobbs so I don't really care how they became friends. You don't even found out that C.C. and Effy are brother and sister until the end, and so when C.C. essentially betrays Effy you don't even feel that bad about.
This "film" (which is really a nice thing to say about it) didn't offer any depth to the characters. I didn't even know that Taylor (Foxx) was a dirty businessman until the end when the plot called for his demise. And Beyonce's character doesn't even have depth. At the beginning of the film there is some tension that is implied when Beyonce speaks of her mother and then all of a sudden her mom's sitting with Taylor watching her daughter shine and the like. The relationship had no depth, didn't evolve, didn't move, didn't do jack and all of a sudden I'm supposed to care deeply about this woman who back-stabbed one of her "best friends" (I think that's what we're supposed to believe about her relationship with Hudson's character Effy).
Eddie Murphey shined in this film and Hudson did a respectable job. Her character had the most depth, the one qualm I have with her character is when Taylor tells her to get lost she has a 20 minute song that she repeats the same thing over and over and over again and I got really really sick of seeing this stupid girl sing about how her love was leaving her. She was such a disgruntled character and selfish and had an "I care about ME and ME only" attitude that I just wanted her to shut up. I was actually GLAD that Taylor left her.
Speaking of Taylor, I actually didn't MIND him, I almost liked him more than Glover's character because he was attempting to achieve the American Dream and he was actually doing it. He knew what he wanted and he found a way to get it. It was only at the end that I didn't like his character because of how he treated Boyonce and how apparently he was doing dirty business dealings and skirting people out of money. Of course, I didn't know all of that until the end though.
To credit the screenplay writers for SOMETHING because they didn't do much right, the transitions that they wrote in with the songs and the way they made the songs somehow relate to the things happen in the film was pretty impressive. However, in the film Taylor takes all substance out of the songs as a "marketing" or "business" thing to fulfill an objective of making more money, so at a point you stop caring about the music too.
In essence, don't waste your time. This movie has been nominated for best musical or comedy by the Golden Globes, and will probably receive a nomination from the Academy as well, but it doesn't even begin to compare to the beautiful comedies that are Little Miss Sunshine and Thank You For Smoking. God help the writers of this movie, because they should be able to learn A LOT from this terrible mistake.