"A voice like yours, it's a gift from God."

Rating: 7/10 (10 February 2015)

By no means a bad movie, but it puzzles me why John Lloyd Young had the Frankie Valli part. Maybe my hearing is worse than I thought, but in the early going, Young's singing voice didn't sound very good to me when he auditioned for The Lovers. I kept waiting and waiting and the group didn't really impress me until the Four Seasons came up with their first hit "Sherry", and even then something just sounded off to me.
But I did like the story of how the guys came together. The revolving door at Rahway where Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) was on a first name basis with the prison guards caught me by surprise because I wasn't aware of the criminality in the group's background. A lot of the personal stuff I take with a grain of salt anyway because making stuff up for movies is pretty much par for the course and not unique to the present day.
As for director Eastwood, the film didn't strike me as one of his stronger efforts. The picture almost never rises above the standard of a made for TV biopic, and in that regard, one could make a comparison with the 1998 film about the Temptations, which scores fairly well here on IMDb. I did like the Eastwood cameo as Rowdy Yates in an episode of 'Rawhide' to provide resonance for 'Walk Like a Man'. That was pretty cool.
Reaching back to the days of my own youth, I can say I was there (at least in my living room), when The Four Seasons made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, just like I was for groups like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Steppenwolf and a host of others. Unless you were watching teen shows like American Bandstand, one of the only ways to stay hip was to make sure you didn't miss a new singing group on the Sullivan show. So that scene was a nice stroll down memory lane.
Would I recommend the film? I think so with the reservations I mentioned earlier. It can't be just me that thought the pre-hit songs didn't come across all that well. By the end of the film the music seemed to have gotten back on track well enough, and the closing number with all the cast members was entertaining and well done. But by that time it was the real Four Seasons music you were listening to, and the difference was pretty notable.