Film
Chicago
- Director
- Rob Marshall
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 113 mins
Rob Marshall’s 2002 adaptation of the ancient Broadway hit works hard to entertain those whose toes defiantly refuse to tap by filleting out all its non-narrative elements to leave a strong if somewhat simplistic storyline. Enthusiasts of the traditional hearty hoofing and crooning business will also be delighted to find that despite these liberties and the eccentric casting, the screen Chicago is decidedly old-fashioned, respecting its source and refusing to resort to any feeble Moulin Rouge-style MTV editing trickery to conceal its lack of substance. Indeed, for much of its running length, this is no more than a filmed record of the stage production, with an awful lot of close-ups as if to remind us that we’re actually watching a movie. Marshall’s remarkably effective conceit is to have the song and dance routines playing out in the imagination of jailbird Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger), with a handful of freshly scripted linking sequences taking place in the stylised ‘real’ jazz age Chicago.
Roxie’s a star-struck and ambitious if somewhat dim-witted girl who dreams of making her mark on the Chicago stage. She cheats on her doormat hubby Amos (John C. Reilly) with a lowlife scumbag who claims to know all the main players and fills him full of lead when he fails to deliver. In chokey, she meets up with vampish stage queen Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and these two celebrity murderers vie for the attentions of flash celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) – imagine a tap-dancing cross between George Carman and Max Clifford – who boasts that for $5,000 he could even have secured the release of Jesus.
Gere does the twinkly-eyed charmer bit to perfection, while Zellweger’s likeable persona helps us to side with her amoral character. But both pale next to the pros: former West End star Zeta-Jones and formidable rapstress Queen Latifah, who makes a perfect corrupt and matronly prison governor. The film could have done with rather more of the inventive and resonantly topical routines like We Both Reached for the Gun, in which Flynn is shown as a ventriloquist manipulating both Roxie and the tabloid hacks, but boasts an agreeable, astringent streak of cynicism in its depiction of the press, courts and celeb-hungry public.
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