An average movie

To be honest, since this movie had received some rather abysmal reviews, I had some low expectations but, since there was a solid cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. If you add the facts that I don’t like musicals in general and that this one was more than 2hrs long, I was clearly not excited about watching the damned thing. And, yet, to my surprise, I thought it was not bad at all after all (apparently, I wasn’t the only one since the public score on Rotten Tomatoes is 88%). Sure, it was rather jarring to have them cut to singing in the middle of a scene but it still worked mostly because Ben Platt sings so beautifully. It was also a good choice to have him singing live during his scenes and not do some playback. It had been also a while since I saw a musical with some songs which were actually catchy. Unfortunately, even though Platt gave a strong performance and even though it’s difficult to imagine anyone else to play this role, he was still 10 years too old to play this character and it was pretty obvious. The rest of the cast was pretty solid (Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams, Amandla Stenberg) but, in spite of the rather long running time, they were not given much to do after all. Eventually, did the story really work? I’m not so sure. I was also bothered by the fact that Evan had a completely different behavior at the beginning and at the end of the movie which would mean that going through something so traumatic would have helped him to become a more functional young man which I obviously didn’t buy. And, yet, there was something so genuine about Evan Hansen and Connor Murphy (such a pity that the guy disappeared after 10 mins) and what they were going through. At least, it was refreshing to see a musical dealing with something substantial instead of the usual fluff. Anyway, to conclude, it turned out to be much better than I expected and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

6/10