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...ехидная статья из Entertainment Weekly от 14 января:

Full of Hot Aria
Joel Schumacher takes on another masked hero in the unfabulous Phantom of the Opera, by Owen Gleiberman

Emmy Rossum, Gerard Butler
PG-13, US mins. (Wamw Bros.)

There's a moment in The Phantom of the Opera that achieves a morbid kitsch splendor that the rest of the movie could have used more of. The Phantom (Gerard Butler), in his cape and cravat, his glossy white mask and Strangelovian gloves, is leading Christine (Emmy Rossum), the teenage chorus girl-turned-diva who's his secret objet d'amour, down a catacomb lined with candelabra that are held aloft by human arms. It's an image lifted right out of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast—but what the heck, at least the director, Joel Schumacher, is stealing from the best. Christine believes that the Phantom is the ghost of her dead father. As she and her tormented daddy-ghoul admirer make then-way to his hidden lair, buried deep under the Opera Populaire in Paris, they sing a macabre duet that climaxes with the descending refrain "The Phaaaaaan-tom of the op-er-a is there, inside my mind!" It takes a certain fearlessness to craft a line that grandiose, but it would be sheer snobbery to deny that the song, with its blast of old-dark-castle organ, insinuates its corniness. For a moment, the Phantom is right where he should be: inside your mind. The rest of the time, he's in the world's most lavish furniture showroom.

There's a certain kind of movie director who loves to get the audience drunk on stylized, rococo imagery—who thinks and dreams in a wilder shade of purple. He employs sets and costumes of an extravagance that would shame Cecil B. DeMille (if not Jean Paul Gaultier) and, whenever possible, he weaves and swirls his camera as though it were a swooning dance partner. The Fellini of Satyricon was that kind of filmmaker, and so was Ken Russell in his composers-as-rock-gods heyday, and also the Baz Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge. How I wish that Schumacher, in his adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 smash-hit horror operetta, had earned a place among their company. I long, in other words, to agree with all the critics who've accused Schumacher of staging this movie as a crime against good taste.

If only! The problem with The Phantom of the Opera is that Schumacher isn't vulgar enough. The 19th-century sets—pillowy dressing rooms, the opera house with its crystal spaceship of a chandelier—certainly look expensive; one can marvel at the miles of velvet and fake gold leaf that went into constructing them. Yet they're photographed stiffly, without decadent atmosphere or visual flow. The Phantom's lair, which should be a place of monstrous mystery, is a brightly lit mess of scattered bric-a-brac, complete with unmade bed; he might be a haunted resident of a sophomore dorm. Schumacher, the man who added nipples to Batman's suit, has staged Phantom, chastely, as if his job were to adhere the audience to every note. (He should have realized that the songs come with their own glue.) The result is a musical that isn't liberated from the stage so much as it's trapped, with waxworks literalness, on screen.

Just because Andrew Lloyd Webber holds a patent on romantic bombast, his music hovering between melody and mush, doesn't mean that a tasty (if overripe) screen spectacle couldn't have been fashioned out of The Phantom of the Opera. The songs may be saturated with sentiment, but they fall pleasantly on the ears; they're like naturally pretty girls who've been overly made up. The most memorable number here is "All I Ask of You," the duet between Christine and her (non-scarred) beau (Patrick Wilson). It's a song that, each time it is heard, is supposed to drive the Phantom quietly mad with romantic jealousy, and the gentle, arcing chorus, with its lovely suspended refrain, is just elegiac enough to do the trick. Emmy Rossum, who looks like Jennifer Beals and sings like Julie Andrews, has an unforced sweetness, not to mention a sublime collarbone, though I wouldn't have minded if her Christine came off as slightly less pure than an animated Disney heroine. The Scottish actor Gerard Butler, by contrast, exudes little charisma beneath his mask, and he sings like a Meat Loaf stuffed with too much garlic. He's too roaringly "overpowering" in the Broadway manner to invite us into the Phantom's exquisite torment.

It scarcely matters how much schlock-rock eloquence the Phantom musters to salute "the music of the night": If he fails to break our hearts, then this story can't take wing. The Phantom of the Opera isn't the dud that Evita was, yet it's stuffed and mounted when it should be shameless and wrenching. The movie achieves a newly stodgy style of corporate excess: Call it under-the-top. C+