Les Miserables

Year: 2012
Genre: Musical
Directed: Tom Hooper
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Eddie Redmayne, Aaron Tveit, Samantha Banks, Daniel Huttlestone, Cavin Cornwall, Josef Altin

For the uninitiated, Les Miserables concerns itself with the lives of 19th century Frenchmen and women dealing with issues as vast as love, redemption, god, hardship, and revolution. The principle yarn involves a former convict named Jean Valjean (Jackman) who makes a promise to a young lady (Hathaway) to take care of her young daughter after she succumbs to illness.

If bravado and bombast were an award category, I'm sure Les Miserables would take home the blue ribbon. But while "Les Mis" is filled with many, lets say rewarding emotional peaks, the film as a whole suffers from way too much muchness; too many story lines, too many indispensable characters, too many close-ups! Too many sustained moments of cathartic weeping and whimpering, clunking along to the ebbs and swells of Claude-Michel Schönberg's musical score.

This is not to say the makers shouldn't be credited for their hard work. Recording the vocals live instead of in studio must have been exhausting and ultimately did add a little je ne sais quoi to the proceedings, but like the first films in technicolor, the artists behind the camera just didn't know what to do with such techniques.

The story of "Les Mis" has been adapted for the big screen more than a dozen times, and will likely be adapted again in the future. Watch it only if you have to, otherwise consider "Les Mis" obvious Oscar bait likely to be forgotten by this time next year.

Final Grade: D+