Young newcomer Emmy Rossum ( The Songcatcher), has a beautiful, sweet innocence and a warm soprano voice, but did anyone inquire if she could act? She walks through the movie with essentially one expression of open-eyed vulnerability on her face. He often sounds as if he's straining and he rarely sustains a musical phrase. Butler doesn't offer "The Music of the Night" it's more like the music of mid-afternoon. The first is that the guy's a hunk! (He should be at least a little scary-looking.) The second is that he doesn't have the voice for the part.
Gerard Butler is wrong for the title role on two counts. He has turned what might have been an exciting stunner of a film into an empty, emotionless music video. Enter Joel Schumacher, who made one wrong choice after another.
Making it into a smash movie musical should have been a no-brainer, given the right sensibility on the part of the director. Phantom should have been easily adaptable to the screen indeed, the stage version was a movie waiting to be made. Taken on its own terms, is this a movie musical that works? We are heartbroken to report that it is not. These battles were fought long ago the issue at hand is whether the famous stage version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's pop opera has been successfully adapted to the screen. Either you hear it as lush and romantic or you find it overbearing. By the same token, there's no need to discuss the score. There's surely no need for us to relate the plot if there's a TheaterMania reader who hasn't seen Phantom on Broadway, we'd be very surprised. Unfortunately, the movie never comes anywhere near that kind of brilliance again. This thrilling visual is an exquisitely cinematic segue into the flashback that is, in fact, the story of Phantom. As it rises, the black and white footage gives way to color, transforming the opera house to its remembered glory. All is muted and subdued - until a shattered chandelier, now restored, is unveiled, lit, and then is raised once again.
Significant looks are passed between the aged participants. We're inside an abandoned Paris opera house where an auction is taking place. The film begins as a black and white photo that comes to life the camera swoops in from a distant long shot to a more intimate, almost prying point of view that almost makes us feel we're watching archival silent movie footage. The opening sequences of Phantom are spectacular. Hoping that the critical and commercial success of Chicago would not turn out to have been a fluke, we sat in high anticipation as the lights went down and the movie began. In a cinema landscape virtually barren of musicals, it would have given us great pleasure to extol the virtues of this transfer from stage to screen. We wanted to like the film version of The Phantom of the Opera.
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