Love Motown - Avoid This...

Rating: 1/10 (4 February 2007)

..as the cast burst into their 14th song in quick succession the UK cinema audience I sat with was laughing...
The problem with this film is that it did not get Diana Ross and Berry Gordy on board to help writing the script and to sanction the use of the Motown back catalogue, and some of the Supremes greatest classics. Dreamgirls is a film about the Supremes and Motown - without any of the classic Motown songs. Which is like going for a swim in a puddle.
Don't get me wrong - some of the songs are punchy and the cinematography is great, however the script misfires by being almost entirely sung and glued together by some truly awful ballads. These ballads warble into each other in a Mariah Carey (esque) way that had the UK audience at first cringing and then walking out of the cinema in their droves.
Eddie Murphy's charisma comes across, but unfortunately he is let down by the laughable way that the Tom Eyen & Bill Condon script (which is loosely based on ex supreme singer Mary Wilson's book "Dreamgirl") tries to combine Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye into one character (Which is frankly an insult to these outstanding artists). He is an actor, not a magician.
If you look at this film outside of its Motown context, what might work well on Broadway does not really translate to the Big Screen. At first the film is promising, some good songs are punctuated with interesting characters. After half an hour the films artistic direction takes a turn for the worse and the plot lines become entirely sung. At this point the film starts loosing it. The 5 minute, 6 way sung argument is just a flawed concept, and is perhaps one of the worst moments in the history of cinema. It just doesn't work on any level. It makes the audience uncomfortable. At this point people started walking out... A stronger director would have reworked this and could have saved this film.
The bottom line is - if your going to tell this story - tell it right and use the right music. Don't try and cobble together a script from 4 different stories that would merit a film on there own. Fortunately one good thing may come of the back of "Dreamgirls" success. Artists like the Jackson 5 are looking to put their own stories into West End end theatres. Has this film really got 8 Oscar nominations?