The Greatest Showman (PG)
JJ Failing to live up to the title, PT Barnum musical The Greatest
Showman restricts Hugh Jackman by denying him and us the dazzling routines he’s more than capable of delivering. Instead, in softening the story of the infamous freak-show peddler and circus impresario, the film – which has nothing to do with the hit 1980s Broadway and West End musical Barnum – stitches together a one-size-fits-all outsider story with
X-factor-ready torch songs autotuned to within an inch of their lives. As Barnum, Jackman is ill-served by the film’s shadeless conception of him as a social climbing tailor’s son who’s far too easily redeemed when he risks the happiness of his family and his performers by constantly courting New York’s disinterested elite classes. The film even has the gall to adopt an us-against-them approach via Barnum’s many contretemps with a joyless theatre critic; pretty rich given it’s Barnum – and by extension the film – who patronisingly views the paying public as one amorphous group easily pleased by any old slop. It’s all very bogus.