Despite the mediocre narrative stuffing, Marshall’s musical is deliciously entertaining with the sizzling performance of a Zeta-Jones who commands the picture.
A new breed of film which was actually quite popular a couple of decades before, is surprisingly making a comeback and riding off the same tip of the wave as last year’s Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! is this great little number bursting with plenty of visual flair and loaded with an ensemble of actor’s energy. Director Rob Marshall combines a theatre production from the seventies with the film musical style of a Singin’ in the Rain to make one of the year’s most dazzling numbers.
Chicago is about a warped crimes of passion story (the passion being the limelight) about a blonde Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger-White Oleander) with plenty of ambition who dukes it out behind bars with the fabulously Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones-Traffic). Making it big is a pretty hard thing to do when your in the cage, but high-profiled, sharp-looking, infamous lawyer William ‘Billy’ Flynn (Richard Gere-Unfaithful) who gets attention through the headlines and makes it seem as easy as taking candy away from a baby. The narrative is laid it in such a way that we get one story explained in both the descriptive hip song and dance numbers and with the regular.
Switching from one camera angle to the next, the film’s introductory sequence is a jazzed up little number which really sets the tone for the rest of the picture and also emphasizes the pinball-machine aesthetic quality of the film particularly with an eye-popping cinematography and vibrant use of color-tones which is nicely pieced together with by quick edits translating into a very flashy production with authentic set-décor and a costume design that creates the fly-style that would be found in a 30’s windy city. Zellweger character is interesting and her performance is fine, but she doesn’t deserve the gold star honors that the critics have been giving her, and as far as acting is concerned Zeta-Jones out-performs her co-freres with some surprisingly great acting, singing and dancing skills. The addition of Queen Latifah (Bringing Out the Dead) as Mama Morton and John C. Reilly (The Hours) as the sad-clown faced desperate husband are nice fits to the picture but the real fun comes in the prison cell number with the “snap-crackle-pop†rendition.
Marshall has created a fine picture her, beautifully detailed and worth the trip to the theatre, it sometimes has a little too much flash and suffers from overly-eager editing and lacks the kind of filmic spunk as found in the very imaginative Moulin Rouge!, but nonetheless Chicago is an enjoyable tap and a step number but sometimes comes off looking like an average film.