OVP: The Greatest Showman (2017)

Film: The Greatest Showman (2017)
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Keala Settle
Director: Michael Gracey
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"This is Me")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I watched and defended Glee longer than I should have.  I realize that in hindsight, but at the time it was a great salvation for me.  I was lonely in a city with very few friends and no family, and Glee was a weekly reminder that "it was all going to be okay" a message I wasn't receiving from anyone I saw on a day-to-day basis.  As a result, when the show went completely off-the-rails (surely by the time they all went to college), I felt a civic duty to stand behind it, continuing to watch it, and not just because I really wanted Sam and Blaine to get together.

(Spoilers Ahead) What does Glee have to do with anything here?  It's because The Greatest Showman is almost completely copying what Glee did in those final few seasons of the series.  The movie is centered around PT Barnum (Jackman), the famed showman who did have a fascinating life, well worth a movie or four to investigate, but this is not really about The Greatest Showman.  This is instead about shoving a message down our throats while surrounding that message with a series of musical numbers...again, much like Glee.

The movie itself could be summed up in about four sentences.  Barnum is born from nothing, but ends up marrying a rich girl "out of his league" named Charity (Williams).  He decides, after tricking a bank into giving him money, to open a museum of curiosities that eventually turns into what we now call the circus.  Along the way he recruits a bearded lady (Settle), a beautiful trapeze artist (Zendaya), and a business partner in the form of Philip Carlyle (Efron), who falls for the trapeze artist.  Still wanting to fit in with the society set he can't ever reach thanks to class snobbery, he sponsors an opera singer named Jenny Lind (Ferguson), but in the process alienates his new "freak" friends, and in the end we find out that they are all the family that he needs.

If that sounds like a bad episode of Glee, you officially get where I was going with this opening.  The movie can occasionally cling to some solid music (Pasek & Paul are no slouches), but man is this a bad movie if you discount the music.  The acting is cheesy and under-baked (and not just in the way you'd expect from an old-timey musical)...no one is doing these characters justice, not even the usually reliable Williams and Ferguson.  Zendaya is a great dancer and a fun performer, but she needs to work on her acting chops.  At least she can claim she's relatively new to the screen, something neither Jackman nor Efron are able to do.  Jackman's singing voice I've never been a fan of, but here his acting is more troubling, as he plays Barnum too earnestly, even when he's meant to be a bit more conniving in order to make the plot believable, and both give off the aura of the guys who are too manly to celebrate the gaudiness of the movie they're in.  In a film with a lot of performances, no one is even hitting a ground rule double.

The script itself is the worst part, though.  Listen, I know that anti-bullying messages are important, and I was fine getting it when I saw Ferdinand the next day (review coming in the next week) since that's a movie for children, but is it bad that I point out that this message is insanely played out at this point?  I get when the actual president is a tyrant and bully, it makes sense that we need this reminder frequently, but this feels like a cookie cutter script from an after-school special, and it's in a film that is almost completely geared toward adults.  It does not deal with shades of grey well, which is a bummer as Barnum was an important but very complicated man, and you'll leave wondering why arguably the most saccharine and groan-inducing song in the film is probably going to be the Oscar-nominated one ("Never Enough" is far, far better than "This is Me," not to mention "Rewrite the Stars" which would have the added benefit of being a show-stopping duet).  All-in-all, this is a movie that, the best thing you can say about it is to just buy the soundtrack.  The worst you can say is that in the post-Moulin Rouge cinematic musical boom, this is about as good as the big-screen version of Rent.