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91The cast is good, the score is sublime, the visuals are sumptuous and it speeds along with a delirious romantic power that, if you let it, can sweep you away.
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88If you've been seduced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version of "The Phantom of the Opera," you'll fall in love with the gorgeous, splendidly cast film.
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80The much-publicized decision to go "younger and sexier" with the casting--a move that turns out to pay off handsomely, enhancing and enriching the material.
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75Phantom, still running on Broadway after sixteen years, is a rapturous spectacle. And the movie, directed full throttle by Joel Schumacher, goes the show one better.
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75I am recommending a movie that I do not seem to like very much. But part of the pleasure of moviegoing is pure spectacle -- of just sitting there and looking at great stuff and knowing it looks terrific. There wasn't much Schumacher could have done with the story or the music he was handed, but in the areas over which he held sway, he has triumphed.
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75Scotsman Gerard Butler does a fine job as the charismatic, ghostly character.
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70Sumptuous pic version, which evokes the original show while working as a movie in its own right, is lit by a radiant, vocally lustrous perf by teenaged Emmy Rossum.
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It's gorgeous nonsense to look at, and in director Joel Schumacher's hands, "Phantom" emerges as one of those queer works of art that actually improve somehow as they get tackier and more removed from the original.
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70Isn't just for music fans. It's more accessible than that, thanks to Joel Schumacher's bright direction and a few storytelling embellishments.
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63Fans will cheer at Schumacher's faithful inflation of Webber's vision, which interprets all that pomp and bombast as if the show were some sort of overblown Vegas attraction.
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60What the film most damagingly lacks though is a sense of mystery and danger.
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60The end result, although entertaining and well-crafted, certainly isn't on the same breathtaking scale of, say, Alan Parker's epic "Evita."
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58The result isn't liberated from the stage; it's trapped, with waxworks literalness, onscreen.
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Depending on your predilection, the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera is about as good - or as bad - as its phenomenally successful stage original.
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50The acting and crooning are sadly uneven, making this a shaky comeback vehicle for the screen musical.
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50Flamboyantly over-the-top, visually kinetic.
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50Finally, you get down to the music, which is easy to take for the first hour, before it starts doubling and tripling back on itself, in an unnerving and seemingly unending spiral of repetition.
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50With Lloyd Webber onboard not just as composer but also co-screenwriter and producer, the film seemed destined to stay true to its roots rather than attempt to transcend them.
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50Ultimately, however, appreciation of The Phantom of the Opera will hinge upon your opinion of Lloyd Webber's skills as a composer.
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50But beneath the bombast it's pure paste and tinsel and, robbed of the thrill of live performance, the show's deficiencies are glaringly apparent.
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50It's sometimes hard to tell the characters from the candelabra. This lavish screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical is so chockablock with decorative detail the human figures are often competing with the decor for attention.
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40One can't help but wonder how much better this film would have played straight, without its characters in seemingly constant song. God help us if there's a film version of "Cats" in the works.
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40Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.
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40Teen romance and operetta-style singing replace the horror elements familiar to moviegoers, and director Joel Schumacher obscures any remnants of classy stage spectacle with the same disco overkill he brought to "Batman Forever."
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38Combines fingernails-on-blackboard audio agony with bamboo-under-fingernails physical torture.
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30This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.
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30Adding an additional layer of cheese to a project that already reeks hopelessly of Velveeta, Schumacher pumps up the empty spectacle, stranding his fetching-but-lifeless mannequins amid giant sets and overblown production numbers.
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This Phantom's an overblown mess of ostentatious razzmatazz. Sure, all the ingredients of camp are there (oh, the hubris!), but this isn't a so-bad-it's-good classic. It's worse.
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30The real problem with "Phantom" is the problem with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in general. It's a slow-moving orgy of lowbrow grandiosity that's as tedious as it is overblown and pretentious.
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30Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.
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30An experience best likened to being battered by hurricane-force winds generated by an organ with all stops pulled permanently out.
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30We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.
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25Crashing chandelier, crashing bore.
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25It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.
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25Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.
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25In Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.
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20Runs two hours and 20 minutes and plays like 10 days in the county jail.
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20Made for the most excruciating two-and-a-half hours I've ever spent in a theater.
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16It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 243 out of 289
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Mixed: 11 out of 289
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Negative: 35 out of 289
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