Les Miserables (2012) Review

I'm having trouble deciding If I like this movie because I'm so attached to the musical or if it's actually a good movie. The musical holds such a special part in my heart. It's a well put together movie, most everything is spectacular. Russell Crowe was terrible. It seemed like he tried to sing with a bad Sean Connery impression. He was awful. Amanda Seyfried acted like she could sing, but she couldn't. Everyone else was at least good. Hugh Jackman did a very good job at getting his point across, he made his goal very clear to the audiences. Anne Hathaway won the Oscar for good reason. Eddie Redmayne and Aaron Tveit were excellent standouts. Sacha Baron Cohen had potential to steal the show, but he fell flat. I just knew he could go one step further to give his best performance, but he didn't. Samantha Barks was the best because she has actually done this part (in the Les Miserables 25th Anniversary) and knew how to play it extraordinarily well (and she is really the only one with an incredible voice.) During this movie I didn't check the time once which is always a good sign. In my opinion when you exit a movie, your emotion and what you feel should be reflected upon the tone the director was trying to get across throughout the evolution of the film. This movie succeeded in that regard. When this movie was over, I got up and sang my way out of the theater to the music playing with the end credits. I even sang into the hallway and started a mini flash mob with 3 people. It was so fun to share my excitement and my enjoyment of the film with complete strangers. I still can't decide If I like this movie because I'm attached to the musical or if it was just a really well-rounded movie. With all things considered I'm leaning towards the side of it being a good quality movie. Even if the singing was a low point (which it hardly was) their acting job did exactly what they were supposed to do in the sense that I could feel their emotions, I could see the objective they were trying to get to and the many different ways they were going to accomplish it, it's always nice to see actors acting in roles where you can definitely tell that they put their heart and soul, that they did as much research as the can to give us the audience an amazing performance. Tom Hooper the director did such a good job with this complicated movie making process. He very well could have done a terrible job, but he didn't. I was very impressed. If you are debating if you should see this movie, I recommend seeing it. However if you are not a fan of long movies this might be a difficult movie to watch and not get distracted. The performances, the directing, and I didn't even mention the cinematography or the visual effects. Those 4 reasons should be able to captivate your interest and make you focused on the screen one-hundred percent of the time. This movie gets a score of....................4.29/5.
Go sit down and watch this movie.