Like being conned, and not in a fun way...

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2018)

It's a bad sign when before a movie even starts, the star and director appear on screen and beg the audience to like their project, as Hugh Jackman and Michael Gracey do here. Uh, guys, maybe let the film speak for itself, like most filmmakers do?
I find it funny how personally offended some people seem to get when critics slam a movie that they happen to like. Critics are entitled to their opinions, after all. And in the case of "The Perfect Showman", not all the critical reviews have been negative. However I would have to strongly agree with those that are. This movie has the seeds of some interesting ideas floating around in it, but it's ultimately very badly done. Even leaving aside the lack of factual accuracy in Barnum's story and taking it purely at face value as a piece of fantasy entertainment, it might have been good, IMO, if some actual craftsmanship had been employed. But almost nothing in "The Perfect Showman" works well. The story is simplistic, overly sentimental and devoid of any character depth or development. The look of the film is dark and ugly for the most part, and the musical numbers are shot like music videos, with rapid cuts and no sense of the storytelling continuity needed for effective musical theatre. The music production is terrible, with lyrics getting subsumed by loud orchestrations in the big production numbers, and so much processing done on the vocals that they sound distractingly artificial even though the actors, with one exception, are all doing their own singing. The setups for/transitions into songs are clumsy or nonexistent, and the songs themselves are tuneless, bland, anachronistic and forgettable pop-shlock, something which I have now come to expect from these songwriters.
It pains me to write this because I know some of the people involved in the making of this movie, and because I am a big fan of musicals when they are well done. I knew next to nothing about "The Greatest Showman" going in, but given some of the people involved, it certainly seemed like a promising bet. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very disappointing overall. The three star rating is for the talented actors, who all come off well (Michelle Williams and Zac Efron in particular) and do an admirable job with the sub-par material they are given to work with. But despite their best efforts I found very little to enjoy in this movie, and it was almost impossible to sit through it from beginning to end.