Phantom: “Horror has a face …”

Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those composers whose works you either love or think sucks. When it comes to Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of Lloyd Webber’s pet project, The Phantom of the Opera,” there are many more who think the latter than the former.

Dozens of the critics listed on, say, the Rotten Tomatoes critical compilation site, are deliciously vicious in describing just how bad this movie is. Others are more, uh, judicious. Some are drooling “Phan”-atics.

Here are just a few examples from around the region:

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran Associated Press Christy Lemire’s review, which read in part, “(W)hen the Phantom (Scottish actor Gerard Butler) steps from the shadows of Paris’ Opera Populaire and shows his masked face for the first time, it’s hard to resist the impulse to laugh. It all seems so campy.” Yet PI staff critic Bill Arnold had a different view: “The cast is good, the score is sublime, the visuals are sumptuous and it speeds along with a delirious romantic power that, if you let it, can sweep you away.”

The Seattle Times’ Moira McDonald had her own say, and her general reaction was also kindly. “(I)t’s a shamelessly over-the-top wallow in romantic obsession, and a thoroughly enjoyable one.”

Shawn Levy of Portland’s The Oregonian, meanwhile, echoed the AP’s Lemire: “It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.”

And up in the Great White North, Leah McLaren of Toronto’s Globe and Mail wrote, “Watching the movie version of ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ certain plot problems that didn’t much matter in the stage version become glaringly apparent. Chalk it up to the magic of the theatre (or the fact that I was 14 when I saw the original) but the filmic ‘Phantom’ is baffling.”

As for me, well, let’s just say that if I have to hear Lloyd Webber’s sad warble about “Music of the Night” one more time, I’m going to find an opera house of my own to hide in. I saw a production of the musical in Seattle a dozen years ago, and I remember having two reactions: One was, “Wow, that chandelier effect is amazing!” The other was to cover my ears and moan, “Oh, that music! The horror, the horror.” And since the movie’s chandelier effect is only a shadow of what it was on stage, about all that’s left IS the music.

The horror , the horror.