less miserables part 2

But then Russell Crowe opened his mouth. “We’ll be ready for these schoolboys, they will wet themselves with blood,” he boomed at one point, as the revolutionaries prepared to attack. Except he doesn’t boom. He whispers.
I wasn’t the only one who hated almost every minute of it. At work the next day, a colleague quietly admitted to having watched it stony-faced as the cinema audience sobbed around her. Anthony Lane, one of the world’s most eminent film critics, also demolished it, saying: “I screamed a scream as time went by.”
Les Misérables is about poverty, pain, isolation, frustration, suffering. The songs are, in every way, “big”. And that’s where, for me, it fell so woefully short. Where Hugh Jackman, as the long-suffering central character Jean Valjean, imprisoned for 17 years for stealing a loaf of bread, should have soared in moments of anger or pain, his vocals died. Instead of following through on the long, sustained notes – of which there are many in Les Mis – he cut them off with a weak, nasal vibrato. It was as if Jackman was afraid to go for it.