I tried to watch The Greatest Showman on DVD and just could not finish it. It ticks so many cliché plot convention boxes and just goes through the motions. Nothing felt genuine.
It doesn't help that it's loosely based on P.T. Barnum--a man who like Thomas Edison made his fame and fortune off the work of many other people while at best throwing them a pittance, though the movie softens him a ton--so of course at some point
when "freaks" have made him rich and famous but the possibility of respectability (plus fame and money) comes knocking he's ready to throw them and his family and the wife who gave up everything for him aside for it without thinking twice. I'm sure that at some point in the movie I didn't stay to watch him learn loyalty to the people who cared about him and helped him when he was nobody, hopefully not cheat on his loving and patient wife after all, and see that he should leave the dance with the people who brought him because the movie is trying to sell him as a good guy gone astray but I had no fucks to give.
None of the main actors really worked for me here either. I've seen Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron be good in other things but they had no spark in themselves or with other people in this movie.
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