Review of Jersey Boys (2014) by Stuart K — 06 Feb 2015

Clint Eastwood is back, this time with his take on the award winning Broadway musical by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who also wrote the screenplay. This is an unashamedly old fashioned musical telling the story of the musical group The Four Seasons, but it has a lot of colour to it, and it shows that Eastwood, even at 84, can still direct engaging and moving films and he's made a very good musical.

It begins in 1951, in Belleville, New Jersey. Where Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young), Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda), get by in music groups and sometimes committing small crimes.

However, all that changes when they're introduced to singer-songwriter Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) by Tommy's friend Joe Pesci (Joey Russo), and they form a musical group, which they call The Four Seasons, and Frankie Castelluccio becomes Frankie Valli.

Their rise to fame soon follows, but Tommy owes money to loan sharks, which tests the group, and they have to go to local mobster Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken) for help. Eastwood went with this after his planned remake of A Star Is Born stalled in pre-production, and while you could argue something like this would have been better suited to Martin Scorsese, Eastwood makes it an enjoyable and gently amusing musical, capturing the period well and staging the musical numbers with panache.