Jersey Boys review

Spoilers!


    First off- I know, I know this was suppose to come out on Friday but I didn't see the movie until Saturday and I got a copy of the walking dead video game and obsessively played it until 3:00 am on Sunday. Also my AC set on fire due to rain experienced the day before so me and my family had to go to my Grandparent's house for the night and leave my computer behind. Also my glasses broke so if this review has a lot of typos that is probably why.

   This week I was supposed to dreadfully watch think like a man too but the person I went to go see this with relented and we watched Jersey boys instead, Hooray for begging!




        Jersey boys is a musical movie directed by Clint Eastwood about Frankie Valli and the four seasons, a popular rock and roll band in the sixties that produced a lot of songs a lot of people have probably heard of.


  Now after watching Jersey boys and having a couple extra days to contemplate the movie I find Jersey boys might go on my worst movie of the year list. I still liked the movie  more than X-men days of future past and non-stop but the thing about something like X-men days of future past where the things that were good were extremely good like the action and the visuals, the good things about Jersey boys is few and far between or almost non-existent.




   Jersey boys was extremely disappointing. I love musicals- Les Miserables, Chicago, Grease, the Rocky Horror picture show etc. However in my opinion no musical has ever been that great not even Chicago which (totally undeserved) won best picture. The problem with musical movies is that they suffer from the place where they were born: the theater.
  
   Musicals and movies are two different beast altogether. A musical you have to act loud enough for the people in the back to hear you, it's an eight hour show in front of a live audience, the staging is different from a movie and the structure is different from a movie as well. In a movie you can be quieter, if you mess up you can reshoot a scene, you only get at most two hours, and a bunch of other things I could list. Things that work in a musical do not work in a movie, which is the problem. Some musical movies either transfer things that may have worked up on stage but do not transfer well on a movie lot. Both medians have different structures and foundations.


 Two of the big problems of Jersey Boys the structure and foundation. Other critics call the movie boring but to me that is not the case, there are actually a lot of funny moments in Jersey boys, the problem is the structure and foundation are so twisted that all the good moments are too far apart from each other or they are diluted.


   In the movie they do a thing you may have seen in the trailers where they break the fourth wall and talk to the audience. This is a trope that is done often in musicals, it was ok for the most part but It adds to the structure problem of Jersey boys. This is done by three out of the four Jersey boys and when this happens its confusing as to whether or not the boys are actually talking to the audience or to someone else. If they had cleaned it up more, and maybe transitioned  it a little better this would have been one of the pluses of the movie. Also the narrator switched between Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio and Nick Massi randomly making the process even more of a mess.




   The structure and foundation is not as apparent in the first thirty minutes of the movie until they jump backwards in time making and the lack of a sound structure is apparent very suddenly and it gets worse as the film goes on to the point where when I walked out of the movie by head started to hurt. On that same note the timeline in this movie is another problem. We get a title card at the beginning saying it's 1961 but as the movie goes on we don't get a clue to how many years has gone my and there is really no indication to what year it is until maybe a third of the movie in when it seems as though they are in the seventies. Also the main characters in the movie never really age ( Erich Bergen gets a hair piece and a beard but expect for him that's it), they get old man makeup for like five minutes at the end but for the most part they say young men throughout the movie when they really should be aging at least a little.


  The four leads are John Lloyd Young ( Frankie Valli), Erich Bergen (Bob Gaudio), Michael Lomenda (Nick Massi) and Vincent Piazza( Tommy DeVito.) This is the first movie that any of them have stared in (not to mention lead) and three out of the four leads are from the Jersey boys musical. This is both a plus and a con of the movie. On the positive side it's great because all of them can sing and sing well, that's another big problem with most musicals is that they often get people ( cough-Russell Crowe cough) for more of star power than whether or not they cans sing.  Yet it's also bad because none of these actors are strong enough to carry a movie. None of them are bad actors but none of them are that great it's all just serviceable. With a movie with as bad of a structure as this you need actors who can carry it well enough to make up for it.


   If I had to come down to it the two best actors out of the four are Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda because when either of them took over as narrator they at least had life to them and I wish them good careers because I think that they have a chance of growing into strong actors who can carry a movie. The two worst were Erich Bergen and John Lloyd Young. Bergen is a better actor than young and is fine but he brings nothing to his role. Young however is worse because really he is suppose to be the main character yet and he has no personality to him, and he doesn't get to narrate once (which is really weird) so we never get of who he is and why he does what he does. Frankie Valli is an interesting character as well and while John Lloyd Young is an Amazing Singer (he sounds just like Frankie Valli) his acting hits flat.




   No one in the movie is really that memorable except Christopher Walken who steals every scene he is in but he's only in here for at least fifteen minutes. This is not a slam against the movie it's just something I thought of and that's from how old he looks in the early sixties and what I can gather from the messed up timeline he really should be dead half-way into the movie.
  
   Now before I go into the biggest problem of the movie and so I don't look like I am giving this movie a 1/10 I will say what the good parts of the movie. The music in the movie (from what little you hear) is fantastic, again John Lloyd Young is an amazing singer and every time the Four Seasons sang you wanted to tap foot with the music. The second positive is the visual aesthetics are amazing, I typically hate grey filter but when Clint Eastwood does it, it's perfect and looks awesome.


    Now for the biggest problem, the biggest problem for this movie as a whole is Clint Eastwood.


   Now before someone shoots me hear me out. Jersey boys is a musical but really it's not at all. I have never seen the original stage production of Jersey boys so I can't judge it on that. However Jersey boys is more of a biopic than it is a musical. While the music is great it's more a of a C level priority for this movie and is really few and far between. Clint Eastwood was more interested in doing an biopic of Frankie Valli and the Four seasons than he was in the musical it self.
    Now that does not mean that the movie had to be the musical, it could have been a fantastic biopic that would have one ten oscars. Yet the movie is also trying to be the musical at the same and all it ends up being is the poster child for identity crisis. I have the feeling that if Clint Eastwood had his way he would have just done a straight forward biopic but I think someone ( mainly the studio heads) came down and told him to make a Jersey Boys musical because it would sell better. This movie wants to be so many different things at the same time it has no time to focus on anything.


   Another problem is there is no life to the movie. While Clint Eastwood movies are usually realistic and somewhat cynical their exciting and thrilling, this movie isn't. While I did say there were some genuinely funny moments in the movie, the rest of the movie has no personality and is nothing but a cold shell of a movie. I heard Jon Faveru was supposed to direct originally and in all honesty he would have been a better choice. At the very least the movie would have been lively instead of near dead. There's no emotion in the movie either even in the movie when Frankie Valli's daughter dies (spoiler) it's so rushed and confused that for the most part you feel nothing.


   Another thing about the movie is the ending- to sum it up it's basically like Lord of the Rings return of the King, it starts out great and emotional but just keeps going and going to the point where it makes the film worse and cringe worthy. They also do a musical encore (another musical trope.) While it's actually kind of fun it makes the movie more of a mess tone wise and it makes it worse because if this was going to be a musical that's really what it should have been.


I am giving Jersey boys- 4/10 great music and visuals everything else though falls apart completely by the end.