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| Released: |
2010 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
MUSICAL
SO BAD
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
119 |
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MIXED Reviews
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| | | It seems as if musicals are allowed good acting or good song-and-dance numbers, but not both. Last year's Oscar bait embarrassment Nine, for example, featured horrid songs performed by talented actors, whereas Burlesque, Christina Aguilera's big screen debut, is burdened by daytime-television caliber performances despite its stunning, high-energy musical numbers. Aguilera plays a tenacious waitress who achieves stardom with the help of tough-as-nails (but maternally so) artistic director, Tess (Cher). The plot that follows, like burlesque itself, is predictable and blatant, but unlike the titular dance it's surprisingly not teasing. Audience response for this should be very enthusiastic, with a highly marketable soundtrack and great musical performances by its stars. Box office, like ancillaries, are spotlight-bright. | | | (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo, Box Office) | | | Cher’s performance is limited by a distracting amount of Botox and cosmetic surgery — the only things that move on her face are her eyes and lips — so she never quite disappears into the role of the cabaret owner trying to stave off bank repossession, but she does make the best of her two songs, proving her voice remains as strong as ever. Curiously, Burlesque never gives Cher and Aguilera the seemingly obvious duet (there were rumors on the set that the two didn’t always get along). But although you can’t really tell if Aguilera is quite ready to carry a dramatic role, she more than excels as the hugely talented singer and dancer who helps put the fading cabaret back on the map. Burlesque is exceedingly well shot and edited — some of the musical numbers are knockouts — and it emits an upbeat, pleasant vibe that carries you right past its plentiful cliches. Best, you don’t even have to know the title of one of Aguilera’s pop hits to appreciate her performance: In case there was ever any doubt, Burlesque proves the girl’s got talent. | | | (Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald) | | | Whereas the ad campaign behind Burlesque tried to push the idea that it was going to be some variation of hyped-up music-video mega-cat fight - fake nail claws and catty comebacks - it appears that Antin has produced something wholly different. To be sure, the many dance numbers are MTV-ready splashes of flashing spotlights and circling cameras, but the music that backs many of them up is refreshingly old-fashioned, a honkytonk jam of pounding drums and smokey horns. In the true spirit of burlesque - or at least the reconstituted variation that's played in hipster venues since the 1990s - the numbers are not so much titillating as they are semi-comical, Ziegfeld-style routines packed with winking razzle-dazzle. One routine with two girls and an underused Alan Cumming too self-consciously recalls some of the better emcee numbers from Cabaret, but Tess's big lonesome ballad delivers as well as expected. As for the story itself, it's pure Horatio Alger, with the preternaturally good-hearted and hard-working Ali never succumbing to the corruption and vice that's mostly non-existent in this PG-13 universe. While characters like Nikki are two-dimensional villains at best - you practically expect to see her toss marbles on the stage in order to injure Ali, a la Gina Gershon in Showgirls - for a film set mostly in a girly club and full of showbiz jealousies, this is a mostly wholesome group of people. For once, that's not a minus. | | | (Chris Barsanti, Filmcritic.com) | | | This corny guilty pleasure of a movie is a fitting two-hander for these seasoned pros. | | | (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post) | | | Burlesque offers burlesque as if it died and went to heaven. Behind a tawdry side entrance on Sunset Strip, a club exists that would make a Vegas casino proud. It has the eerie expanding and contracting dimensions of fantasy. At first, the stage is the right size for an intimate cabaret; later, there's enough space to present a production number with dozens of (unaccounted for) dancers descending a staircase worthy of Busby Berkeley. The audience is all shadowy extras, whose friends will have to look real hard to spot them. | | | | (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) | | | A terrible film that will delight nearly everyone who sees it, whether they're 12-year-old Christina Aguilera fans or bad-movie buffs angling for a guilty pleasure. | | | (Nathan Rabin, The Onion) | | | Aguilera can dance like nobody's business, but her acting debut isn't going to keep Anne Hathaway awake at night. | | | | (Lou Lumenick, New York Post) | | | The tremulous collision of Xtina and the face that launched a thousand drag shows... what happens when an irresistible sex object like Aguilera meets Cher's immovable upper lip. It isn't always pretty but on occasion it's guiltily pleasurable. | | | | (Steve Persall, St. Petersburg Times) | | | It's difficult to imagine a more outrageously camp movie than this glittery romp, and fortunately there's a sense that the cast and crew understand this. By never taking their ludicrous plot seriously, they've made a true guilty pleasure. | | | (Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall) | | | As a piece of film-making, it’s fecking risible. But as a piece of entertainment? It’s a 24-carat, foot-stomping, teeth-rattling hoot that had me in creases for two hours, particularly during the serious bits. | | | (Robbie Collin, News of the World) | | | It’s hard to decide if Aguilera’s waxily rigid performance is an accidental boon to the movie – she looks newly graduated from the Showgirls Academy of Dramatic Arts, with a touch-up at Madame Tussauds – or just its biggest liability. As this gal with a dream, hired as a cocktail waitress, barges her way into the numbers, shacks up with a fauxmosexual bartender (Cam Gigandet, louche as you like), and gives the club its best hope of staving off bankruptcy, we follow every beat of her success story without feeling much about it, either way. She could tumble off the stage and we’d just turn our attention to the backing dancers, who at least have the virtue of lip-synching like they’re told, rather than trying to growl our ears off. Still, Steve Antin’s movie is too hilarious, too often, to be anything other than a pleasure: decide your own level of guilt. Kristen Bell’s uber-bitch rival (“I will not be upstaged by some slut with mutant lungs!”) is satisfyingly ghastly, whether sabotaging the sound system or shrieking at the colleagues who inexplicably want to share her make-up. Stanley Tucci has his now-patented Stanley Tucci Role as a kind of blithely cheerleading seamstress — if he made his eyes roll any more, they’d skitter under Aguilera’s Christian Louboutin pumps and trip her up. | | | (Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph) | |
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Ali - Christina Aguilera 
