THE GREATEST SHOWMAN

Which brings us to the songs, perhaps the biggest misstep of all. Rather than going for a more classical musical approach, Pasek, Paul and Jackman have pushed for a more contemporary pop feel. The resulting songs are bad. Like… really bad. The lyrics are woeful, the melodies are without any personality or originality, and they serve almost no purpose in the story. It’s as if they were dropped from a height to splat with a thud on the screenplay without any attempt to make them work, inane and generic "hit single" pop songs rather than integral elements of the storytelling. I mean, these guys are the lyricists of ‘La La Land’ and composers of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’, for fuck's sake. There’s almost no cohesion between the songs, the screenplay and the score, all working against one another with a grating inconsistency. In fact, the film is better when no one is singing. And then there’s the treatment of women, mostly relegated to plot points or objects to be possessed. When Charity finally gets a solo, the film spends more time cutting away to Barnum building on a potential infidelity than actually focusing on her and her agency.

The problem is, Barnum is a bit of a dick, a whiny social climber who switches between an everyman and an elitist at a moment's notice. Shockingly, Jackman delivers one of his worst performances, lacking in subtlety or detail. His performance is all wide-eyed, high emotion and sweating from extreme effort. He also lacks any charisma at all, exemplified when Zac Efron turns up and basically walks away with the film. Efron and Zendaya (‘Spiderman: Homecoming’), who plays trapeze artist Anne, have some lovely chemistry, but they’re only given time to show it in another dismal duet amongst many others. Williams tries her best, as does Rebecca Ferguson (‘Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation’) who plays an opera singer - who sings, you guessed it, a generic pop song - but they’re basically not given anything to work with. The ensemble that make up Barnum’s troupe are given a little bit of attention, but their unexplored stories would be far more interesting than this arrogant selfish twat who keeps using his young daughters as an excuse for his attempts to stroke his own ego.

‘The Greatest Showman’ really is a sight to behold. Fellow SWITCH reviewer Chris and I spent a lot of it stifling laughs behind our hands and gasping at each unintentionally camp flourish. I wish I hadn’t been in public so I could more vocally react to it, so delicious was its mediocrity and incidental camp. Chris walked out beaming from the atrocity of its existence and I walked out with headache and a lot of questions (mostly, why?). This is a film of enormous ambition but no vision to guide it, an aggressively earnest film with no idea how to harness that energy. Creating an original musical is hard, but Jackman’s passion project is exactly how not to do it. It might be a cult classic in the making, but I very much doubt it. As Chris so eloquently put it afterwards, its the #instagay version of a musical - purely aesthetic, vapid, attention-seeking, and devoid of personality.