In 19th-century France, Jean Valjean, who for decades has been hunted by the ruthless policeman Javert after he breaks parole, agrees to care for factory worker Fantine's daughter, Cosette. The fateful decision changes their lives forever.
Tom Hooper’s screen adaptation of Les Misérables is a heart-soaring, crowd-delighting hit-in-waiting: the Mamma Mia it’s all right to like.
By the end, you feel like a piñata: beaten, in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.
Vive Les Miserables!
This Les Misérables feels as dogmatic as Javert, and as cheesy as old brie.
As a whole the film is easy to mock (accents occupy a weird olde-worlde cod-European netherworld; choreography and design shift oddly between the realistic and the stylised), and – inevitable Oscar glory aside – has a disposable feel; but it’s fun while it’s on, and unless you’re a die-hard musical hater, you’ll head home humming.
A bold filming of a theatrical classic, anyone with a fondness for the original production and a wee greet will lap this up.
There is much to like if you look at the performances, the songs, the humour – and Hooper does capture the disparate worlds of rulers and rebels successfully. But it lacks in many departments: its credence, its rawness, its heart just aren’t reproduced by the lens.
I'll never love Les Misérables the way its fans love it, and I'm agnostic about Claude-Michel Schönberg's surging score, with its strange, subliminal weepiness. But as big-screen spectacle, this is unique.
You should see it in its opening week, on a gigantic screen, with a fanatical crowd. There is a strong possibility I may be among them. Crying, probably.
Bombastic, overblown, overlong, needlessly convoluted and full of simplistic characters, some terrible performances and a constant, cochlea-cracking racket on the soundtrack, the film is yet another example of an inexplicably successful property that’s been turned into a punishing piece of cinema to which millions will undoubtedly flock because millions are clearly suckers for event entertainment in which relentless spectacle no longer has to be tethered to a compellingly told story.
C’est magnifique.
The closest the film comes to theatre is the final tableau of the cast, clambering back on the barricade to sing their hearts out again, even the ones who died in the story. Did I sense in their joyous warbling a relief that it was over? No – I was just sensing my own.
The tale carries on, lingering at the barricades for a while, to its operatic end, an end that could and should have arrived well under the two and a half hour mark. But that's musicals and revolutions for you, no-one wants such good times set in bad times to end.
Occasionally, like its characters, ragged around the edges, this nevertheless rings with all the emotion and power of the source and provides a new model for the movie musical.
Les Misérables is markedly less spectacular in its second half...The action should be momentous, considering that a revolution is brewing, but instead it seems paltry – and altogether more like a stage show than a film.
On screen at least, it's the best musical I've seen for many years, a magnificent achievement that overwhelmed.
Hooper’s decision to have the actors singing live on set (as opposed to having them mime over pre-recorded vocals) gives the performances a raw authenticity, but the substantial running time (which clocks in at roughly two hours, forty minutes) is punishing.
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General release. Check local listings for show times.