Review of Barracuda (2017) by Cmc — 08 Jan 2017

This is an entertaining film worth seeing. So go see it.

That said, I am not happy to report that the movie comes up way short to its Hollywood and French musical antecedents; the gap between what the film aspires to and what it achieves is too great to ignore. The wide-screen Hollywood musicals were a tour-de-force of great singing talent, great dancing talent, flawless staging, studio lighting and cinematography. The actors just are not up to the task of singing and dancing, and I would argue that Ryan Gosling did not even act that well and served as a bit of a downer when exuberance is what was called for. The steadicam camerawork is really sloppy, frequently mis-framing and not using the wide-screen effectively, with many blurry portrait shots. There is occasional and shocking dark vignetting at the corners, and oftentimes mediocre to terrible lighting. The story line, dialogue and plot turns are as trivial as the movies of the past. It seems that the main virtue of the movie is that it is a contemporary attempt at the genre, but really does not offer a great critique or insightful iteration to those movies, it just is not as good. The insertion of the fake super-8 "memory" footage is one of the few attempts to change up the format, but it is a horrible and cheap conceit in any movie. The first scene promises what the rest of the movie does not offer, where the entire world breaks into song and dance. The romantic sparks between the two main characters for the rest of the film are not very emotional.