Frankie goes to Hollywood! What a waste of classy Kevin
Valli’s songs save the stodgy Jersey Boys musical
Jersey Boys (15)
Verdict: Stolid version of the stage hit
AT LEAST West End and Broadway audiences get an intermission. Clint Eastwood’s bigscreen version of the hit stage musical, about the semi- delinquent juveniles who grew up to become Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, lasts over two hours.
That’s a long time to endure one I t alian- American, blue - collar, Eisenhower-era cliché after another, from the father sitting in his vest eating spaghetti, to the feisty crockery-throwing wife, to everyone else saying ‘capisce’ to each other and musing that the only way to get out of the old neighbourhood is to join the army, become a gangster or get famous.
And yet, once I’d accepted that the dialogue i s only the most perfunctory addition to the songs, which are terrific, I began to warm to Jersey Boys. Moreover, I went to see it with my wife, who so enjoyed it that at the end she was all for dancing into the cinema foyer, singing Walk Like A Man.
If nothing else, the film will make you want to see the stage show. Or, alternatively, want to do almost anything but see the stage show.
EASTWOOD’S masterstroke, or alternatively his mistake, is to make no attempt to separate the film from its theatrical roots. Characters talk direct to camera as they might to an audience. Scene after scene appears to have been lifted straight from the Broadway boards.
An attempted late-night heist in a New Jersey street plainly built on a Warner Brothers backlot is interrupted by the friendly neighbourhood cop, who, if he isn’t actually swinging his truncheon as he ambles into shot, might as well be.
It’s young Francesco Castelluccio he encounters, acting as look-out for his punk buddies, but it could just as easily be Gene Kelly, singin’ and dancin’ in the rain.
Castelluccio is the working-class kid with the high-pitched singing voice who gets reinvented as Frankie Valli.
He is played by John Lloyd Young, with whom the role originated on Broadway almost ten years ago. He has Valli’s falsetto down pat, or maybe up pat.
The group’s big break, singing Sherry on American Bandstand in 1963, is stirringly recreated.
Eastwood, the cool West Coast jazz enthusiast, isn’t the most obvious director for a story about New Jersey hotheads singing classic doo-wop, but he was around at the time, which helps, and he cheekily throws in an early Sixties clip of himself, in the TV series Rawhide.
He also knows that his film will live or die by the quality of its musical numbers, and duly allows them all cylinders.
First, though, he has to set up the story of how young Castelluccio came under the i nfluence of swaggering bad boy Tommy de Vito (Vincent Piazza).
Tommy takes the group as far as they can go, playing to appreciative crowds in l ocal bars but only dreaming of emulating the ultimate ‘Noo Joisey’ Italian-American made good, Frank Sinatra.
Then Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) gets in on the act, refining it with proper musicianship and better songs. When record producer Bob Crewe (Mike doyle) hears them, he at first casts them as backing singers. But they are too good for that.
SOON, hit follows hit, and the inspiration for Big Girls don’t Cry comes f rom watching Kirk douglas slap Jan Sterling in Billy Wilder’s great film Ace In The Hole, which is so corny it can only be true.
Meanwhile, the personal tribulations of the band members unfold almost cartoonishly. Frankie is trapped in a loveless marriage, Tommy gets disastrously in hock to the mob. Christopher Walken is allowed to ham it up marvellously
3 Days To Kill (12A) Verdict: Preposterous thriller
KEVIN COSTNER brings some desperately-needed gravitas to this otherwise laughably preposterous thriller about a veteran CIA hitman who must complete a series of kills while also suffering from cancer.
And, as if that were not enough for a chap to worry about, trying to re-engage with his estranged wife and teenage daughter.
The story was conceived and co-written by Luc Besson, which is warning enough to expect wholesale nonsense, even before Ethan Renner (Costner) is instructed to eliminate the world’s most dangerous terrorist, known as The Wolf, and his sinister acolyte, The Albino.
Plausibility seems to be as the neighbourhood’s semi-benevolent godfather Gyp de Carlo, moved to tears by Frankie’s version of My Mother’s Eyes.
I wish I could say that a tragedy in Frankie’s life had the same effect on me, but it is handled so superficially that all I could do was giggle. Still, it was a foot-tapping giggle.
If the Four Seasons doesn’t mean Vivaldi to you, and you have a strong bladder, then go to see Jersey Boys for the music, though not much besides, and rejoice in seeing the names of Valli and Gaudio credited as executive producers.
It’s good to know that after all that spaghetti, all that broken crockery, they’re still going strong. the last thing on the mind of director McG (Charlie’s Angels), as baddies fall like ninepins on the streets of Paris, where Renner’s fragrantly long-suffering wife Christine ( Connie Nielsen) lives with their moody teenage daughter, Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld).
The ambiguous title refers not only to Renner’s assassination brief — given to him by a ludicrously vampish, Ferrari- driving, not- sosecret agent called Vivi (Amber Heard) — but to him taking sole charge of Zooey for a few days while her mother is away.
He is as hapless a dad as he is efficient as a killer, buying her a purple bicycle, even though she can’t ride a bike and purple hasn’t been her favourite colour since she was, you know, like, eight years old.
I’m not sure which scenes bored me more — the father-daughter bonding, the incontinent killing sprees, or McG’s cackhanded attempts to leaven the whole sorry spectacle with occasional stabs at comedy. The always- watchable Costner gives it his very best shot, but his weapons are wasted here.