Tries too hard to be inspirational...fails miserably

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2017)

Well it took nearly til the end of the year for it to happen but I found my least favourite movie of 2017. The name of this horrendous garbage dump? The Greatest Showman. Now, I like musicals so of course I was intrigued to see this. And yet, I cringed every time someone opened their mouths to sing. Its like this movie wanted so hard to be seen as an inspirational tale. Every song shoves this down your throat. I get it movie...we're all special...be who you're meant to be...blah blah blah move on. Now, its by the same guys who did La La Land and Dear Evan Hansen, so I know they can write other stuff. Also, having every song as a pop song felt kind of distracting. But for the most part I could get somewhat past that choice of music....up until the Opera singer showed up. This would have been the point to show an ACTUAL operatic song. But no......another pop ballad. And Rebecca Ferguson, is not a bad singer by any means...but I wasnt exactly wowed by her voice and yet shes being marketed in this movie as like "the best opera singer in the world". Like mmmkay...if you're at least going to go down the pop route Im sure there would have been better choices to make. Someone like Adele, maybe? It also felt very paint by numbers...very safe. I mean, they try to make a point about racism in this movie...and they dont even have the balls to truly explore that. The romance between Zendaya and Zac Efron's characters felt forced. They didnt have any chemistry with each other. I have some other small nitpicks....but boy oh boy....for a movie that kept talking about bringing joy to the audience I sure wasn't feeling it. If I had to say something positive, the costumes are beautiful. And I think the actors were fine. I think PT Barnum is an interesting person to make a movie about, just not in this movie. I think it would have worked slightly better if they hadnt tried to make it a musical.