An average movie

Even though I'm not a huge fan of musicals, since I kept hearing interesting things about this flick, I thought I should check it out. This movie is based on a play which was hugely successful (it ran for more than 5000 performances on Broadway, won several Tony awards and even the Pulitzer Prize) but this movie was a flop which is not really surprising. I mean, I liked a few songs, the intro was especially awesome, but I didn't care for most of them and there were almost wall-to-wall songs. Furthermore, since there were so many songs, there was barely any time to develop the characters so I didn't care much about them. Still, it remains an interesting musical and I liked the fact that it dealt, for a change, with misfits (artists, musicians, the homeless, junkies, the HIV infected, the homosexuals,...). For Chris Columbus, who just directed the first 2 Harry Potter installments, it was something drastically different and you wonder if another director wouldn't have done a better job (other directors such as Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Sam Mendes, Rob Marshall and Baz Luhrmann were rumored to be possible choices for the job). Eventually, I thought the whole thing was not dark enough as, for example, the characters looked way too good to be drug addicts and/or infected by HIV. To conclude, the movie didn't really live up to the play but I still think it is worth a look though, especially if you like the genre.

6/10