The Phantom of the Opera

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals are garish, puerile melodramas with all the elegance and sincerity of a Super Bowl halftime show--and his brash, brassy songs have the depth and nuance of action-movie explosions. Director Joel Schumacher, for his part, was responsible for one of the most tawdry, terribly cliché-ridden action-movie bombs in Hollywood history--1997's Batman & Robin. When this pair teamed up to bring the former's inflated, meandering musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux's classic horror novel The Phantom of the Opera to the big screen, it was clearly a match made in hell. You know the story: a beautiful young soprano (Emmy Rossum, The Day After Tomorrow), who is preposterously easy for men to manipulate, falls under the spell of a flamboyant, half-disfigured, rock-opera-bellowing stalker (scenery-chewing Gerard Butler, chosen for his performance in the schlocky Dracula 2000) who lives in the Rococo bowels of a 19th-century Paris opera house. Here this familiar plot becomes the subject of gross overacting and ostentatious grandeur, without a scrap of digestible character. But even if you like Webber's stage work, ask yourself this: do you really want to see it remade with hell-bent gusto by the guy who put nipples on Batman's superhero costume? Not recommended. [Note: Available in either a two-disc widescreen version or single-disc widescreen or full screen versions, DVD extras o this double-disc set include the 65-minute documentary “Behind the Mask: The Story of The Phantom of the Opera” on the history of the story with live performances, three “making-of” featurettes (45 min. total), one brief additional scene, trailers, and DVD-ROM features (including a weblink to the “Phantom's Online World”). Bottom line: a hefty extras package for a bloated and bland adaptation of Webber's hit musical.] (R. Blackwelder)