Starts good, gets worse, in the end terrible

Rating: 5/10 (16 July 2007)

This movie starts good with excellent recreations of 60s soul. You think you are in for the time of your life. But a bit into the movie, when we reach the late 60s, this musical loses touch with the history of the American soul music it aims to portrait. Song after song, the music turns worse and worse, and at the same time the movie gets worse too, losing itself in sentimental junk. Now, we all know soul music in real life also turned worse. It never got the force back that it had in the mid and early 60s, and much 70s soul was bland and terrible, though not as terrible as what counts as mainstream "r&B" these days. But there was good 70s soul too, and let's not forget funk. This movie forgets it. After the fairly adequate and great display of 60s soul styles in the beginning, the rest of the music is antiseptic, orchestrated Broadway fake-soul ballads of the worst type. The mood of the last half of the movie is a long-winded 'the good days are gone' melodrama of seriously bad quality. My advice: look a the first twenty or so minutes, then forget about it.