Two trains full of confetti, colliding head on

Rating: 2/10 (18 June 2001)

What a mess! Director Baz Luhrmann takes every known cinematic gimmick, tosses them all into a food processor, and splatters the mixture all over the screen like a would-be Jackson Pollock. It's loud, brash, colorful, relentless, and doesn't make a lick of sense. The result is a musical that seems to take place at no particular time, and in no (despite the name) particular place. There's nothing here that even remotely evokes either Paris or credibility, and character development is nonexistent. Ewan McGregor meets Nicole Kidman, mutters a few Bernie Taupin lyrics to her, and she immediately declares that she's "in love." Uh, right. The next 100 minutes consists of various characters engaging in routine and stereotypical melodrama, singing bits and pieces of twentieth century pop songs to one another with songs rarely being sung in their entirety.
The "Like a Virgin" sequence rivals the "Officer Krupke" sequence from "West Side Story" as perhaps the worst three minutes ever presented in a musical film.
The conclusion of the story is totally unmoving, since you don't know the main characters well enough to care about them. When it's over, you just sit there wondering why you paid good money to be visually and aurally assaulted for 126 minutes.
On the plus side, Luhrmann's use of color is impressive. Kidman looks absolutely radiant, and she and McGregor both sing surprisingly well. The opening credits are quite clever.
I'd have been tempted to give this film a rating of zero, but the film is so emotionally uninvolving that I just didn't care about it or any of its characters enough to hate it that much. 2/10.