The most over-rated film ever? Pure contrived advertising and product placement

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2007)

This is the most disappointing film I have ever seen.
It is certainly not the worst film, but I had such high expectations because of the cast and how famous the movie is.
However, as a movie, it is contrived, banal, uninteresting, uninspiring and unbelievable. In fact, none of the movie made sense at all until I watched the special features that contained interviews with some of those originally associated with the movie.
Then it all became clear: One interviewee pointed out that the film was created purely as a vehicle to string some promising songs together, as well as to try and recycle a couple of duds that had bombed in the hope they would be better received on this outing.
And that is exactly what the movie looks like - a disjointed collection of 'music videos' strung together into a contrived story.
Lots of other movies or stage shows have taken the same tack, such as the Abba musical Mama Mia. And while they may be harmless fun, they would not qualify as 'great' musicals in the way that the truly great musicals can - where music and story are brilliantly woven together into a beautiful fabric that is better than either the story or the music could be on its own.
It has some merit as an example of an early advertising vehicle, where the threat posed by product pitches in distorting and destroying art was not yet fully understood. But any reasonably critical view of this film at that time should have stopped this poor film and that tragic trend in their tracks.
As it turned out, audiences were prepared to accept and even celebrate the mediocre in order to fawn over favorite celebrities. And that wide embrace of shameless-advertising-as-art and celebrity over quality would prove over subsequent decades to be the dominant trend.