It's hard not to look at this long-delayed big-screen adaptation of Bob Fosse's Broadway hit musical and think how much better it could be, had the late Fosse himself directed it, as he'd originally meant to. What we have, though, is a very effective, professional and honest rendering of the show, underlining its cynical, prescient take on fame and the media. In 1929 Chicago, aspiring but talentless chorine Renée Zellweger kills a lover who'd wrongly promised her a shot at the footlights, and finds out that her crime of passion may just be the ticket for the big-time she needed in a town where murderers - especially if they're female, vaguely scandalous and very good-looking - are as big as movie stars. "Gods and Monsters" director Bill Condon's script revises the plot, making the musical numbers imaginary projections of Zellweger's surroundings, turning her bleak prison world into a stage of the mind, in an attempt at making the stage-bound conventions of the genre work for audiences less likely to suspend their disbelief today as they were at the musical's heyday. But ultimately this is no "Moulin Rouge", since choreographer and first-time director Rob Marshall means to update a hit stage show for the screen rather than reinventing the musical for modern generations. John Kander and Fred Ebb's stupendous songs are carried through to the film without any attempt at making them sound more contemporary, and the only link between Baz Luhrmann's extravaganza and Marshall's lean, streamlined filming is the cast of "regular" movie stars required to sing and dance, something they do with gusto and an often surprising talent - although Richard Gere's casting as a rakish, money-grabbing star lawyer is inspired, allowing him to make fun of his own image as a hunk, it's Catherine Zeta-Jones's sensuality and ease on the musical numbers and John C. Reilly's suffering, betrayed husband who take the film home. Solid entertainment, but nothing to shout home about and certainly not worthy of its 13 Academy Awards nominations.
