Grade: C-

Original screen musicals are sufficiently rare nowadays that you have to credit any new one, even if it’s not terribly good, for its bravado, if nothing else. “The Greatest Showman” isn’t the first tuner about legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, wrongly credited with saying “There’s a sucker born every minute”—a Broadway extravaganza starring Jim Dale, staged in the fashion of a circus performance, ran for a couple of years in the early eighties. But while Michael Gracey’s movie is equally flamboyant, it’s unlikely to enjoy a similar degree of success. Opulent but flat-footed, and loaded down with a series of top-forty style songs that sound like rejects from “Frozen,” the movie insistently exhorts us to celebrate diversity while itself remaining obstinately commonplace.

After a prologue showing young Barnum (Ellis Rubin, lip-synching to the singing of Ziv Zaifman), the son of a humble tailor, cavorting with young Charity (Skylar Dunn), much to the distress of her snooty father (Fred Lehne), the script skips ahead to Barnum’s return after years of unspecified activity in the person of strapping Hugh Jackman, who swoops in and takes Charity (now Michelle Williams) away to be his wife.

Barnum struggles to find work in New York—he, Charity and their two adorable daughters are living atop a building, it seems—and so he decides to go for broke. Using some worthless bonds from his last job as a bookkeeper as collateral, he purchases a building and turns it into his museum of oddities, hiring performers like Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey) and bearded lady Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle)—as well as trapeze siblings W.D. and Anne Wheeler (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Zendaya)—as part of a diverse group, all of whom he treats with respect. (Barnum’s actual first attraction, Joice Heth, whom he passed off as the 161-year old nanny of George Washington, is present in the crowd, but no mention is made of how he lied about her age, or had her body publicly dissected after her death.)

Despite the public’s embrace of his show—after a rough start, some brickbats from the press (represented by Paul Sparks’ critic James Bennett), and hostility from street thugs who despise his “freaks”—Barnum longs for more. He induces playwright Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron) to become his partner as a way of attracting the city’s swells to the show—much to the distress of Carlyle’s parents, which becomes more severe after he falls for Anne, though whether they object more to her low-class status or the color of her skin is unclear.

After a visit to Queen Victoria (Gayle Rankin) arranged by Carlyle, Barnum decides to take his respectability campaign further by sponsoring an American tour for renowned opera singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson, with singing voice provided by Loren Allred), the “Swedish Nightingale.” That venture earns him the respect he craves but goes south when Lind—who here warbles not opera arias but generic songs straight out of today’s Grammy playbook—develops feelings for him and their relationship threatens his marriage. He also begins keeping his troupe at arm’s length in his striving for societal approval. To add to the debacle, the museum is firebombed in a struggle between the performers and street toughs, and Barnum and Carlyle have to struggle to find a way to return from the ashes. Can anyone say “circus”?

From the standpoint of history, of course, the movie’s portrayal of Barnum is what the actual man would have dismissed as humbug. Barnum was no champion of the downtrodden and marginalized; he exploited them mercilessly for his own gain. But one must set that unhappy reality aside and understand that the movie, co-written by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon, is intended simply as a celebration of American entrepreneurial chutzpah, perhaps the perfect parable for an age in which practitioners of similar hucksterism have ascended to high office (as if that were an entirely new phenomenon).

Even after one accepts that, however, “Showman” is far from great. Certainly the physical production is sumptuous. Nathan Crowley’s production design, Debra Schutt’s sets and Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes are all eye-popping if totally synthetic, and Seamus McGarvey’s camera swoops and swirls around them in a futile attempt to generate some joyful excitement. All of this is in service to Garvey’s apparent determination to emulate the style and pizzazz of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”—an unfortunate model—which thankfully at least does not extend to adding an exclamation point to the title. It’s understandable that a roster of no few than six editors were engaged to try to give the footage some shape; they succeed only fitfully.

The glitzy packaging, moreover, only accentuates the hollowness of the contents. The script eschews any hint of edginess in favor an unvaried celebration of Barnum’s supposedly semi-enlightened showmanship and the triumph of his attractions over the bigotry of the society around them; and the attempt to add swooning romanticism to the mix—not only in terms of Barnum’s lifelong love of Charity but in Carlyle’s love for Anne—is cloying.

Matters are worsened by the songs. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are currently among Broadway’s golden boys because of their score for “Dear Evan Hansen,” and their tunes for “La La Land” only added to the luster. But their work here is pedestrian, with banal lyrics extolling either the magic of imagination or the glory of self-respect conjoined with the kind of cookie-cutter melodies that blend into one another like a bland medley of current pop hits. Despite the fact that many of the tunes get multiple reprises, they all remain obstinately unmemorable; the result is like one of those old Broadway flops where, as wags used to say, you come out humming the sets. Adding to the depressing air is the overly aggressive choreography of Ashley Wallen. There are a couple of engaging duets (for Jackman and Efron, and Efron and Zendaya), but mostly it consists of group stomp-efforts that seem designed to bludgeon you into acquiescence to the picture’s on-the-nose messages.

Of course Jackman brings his patented swagger to the proceedings, but there’s a palpable sense of desperation in his performance, perhaps understandable given that this is a passion project for him; but it feels as though, like Barnum, he knows that he’s trying to put one over on you. Efron has a few nice dance moments, but mostly he underplays morosely, and Settle seizes center stage with aplomb when given the opportunity to belt out what’s supposed to be a show-stopper, but the supporting cast—even Zendaya, Williams and Ferguson—are given little opportunity to shine.

Reviews for “The Greatest Showman” were embargoed by the studio until opening day, never a good sign. In this case the marketers correctly assessed their merchandise. The film resembles the actual Barnum in being lots of empty bluster with only marginal payoff.

Grade: C-

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of remaking 1980’s smash-hit high-tech scary comedy with a female cast, but doing so successfully would require a good deal more imagination and charm than director Paul Feig and his co-writer Katie Dippold bring to this bloated, remarkably unfunny retread, in which some of today’s most talented comic actresses are stuck trying to sell tepid material for nearly two hours. When even cameos by stars of the original “Ghostbusters”—Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver—fall flat, you know the movie is in deep trouble.

Things actually begin fairly promisingly with Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a physics professor at Columbia, wigging out, if you’ll permit the pun, over her upcoming tenure review; the chair (Charles Dance) is a martinet who dismisses even a reference letter from Princeton as being not quite sufficient. But Gilbert’s chances are really put in danger when an anxious fellow (Ed Begley, Jr.) approaches her to investigate spectral phenomena at an old private home turned into a museum (a place introduced to visitors with some choice quips by a tour guide played by Zach Woods). He does so bearing a copy of a book on paranormal activity she co-authored years ago with her childhood pal Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) but has since tried to suppress as a youthful indiscretion. She’s horrified to discover it’s now for sale on Amazon.

Gilbert quickly looks up Yates, from whom she’s been estranged for a long while. Abby has continued her ghost-chasing from a spot in the basement of a school of low repute, where she works with Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), an engineer as well as an obsessed spirit-hunter herself. When Gilbert tells her about the supposedly haunted old mansion, Abby promises to remove the book from the marketplace if Erin will gain them entrance to it. Their visit unleashes a family ghost from the place’s basement, and when Gilbert’s excited reaction hits social media, her professorship is over and she joins Yates and Holtzmann in their quest. The trio quickly becomes a femme foursome when they’re approached by NYC transit worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), who’s encountered a malevolent apparition in a subway tunnel and invites them to investigate it. The team gets a fifth quasi-member when they hire handsome but dumb-as-rock Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) as the receptionist in the office they establish above a Chinese restaurant.

From this point the movie devolves into a back-and-forth juxtaposition of scenes of the ghostbusters bickering and extravagant special-effects sequences in which they take on spirits being unleashed by a psycho janitor named Rowan (Neil Casey), who’s building up to opening a vortex that will unleash armies of nasty ghosts into the world. (One of the battles occurs at the rock concert.) There’s also a sub-plot about how the NYC mayor (Andy Garcia) and his officious aide (Cecily Strong) attempt to brand the busters as frauds in order to tamp down public panic, and a turn in the last hour toward demonic possession, first of Abby and then of Kevin; but these elements offer few laughs and simply weigh the picture down even more.

Needless to say, everything culminates in a huge special-effects battle in the streets of the Big Apple, involving huge malevolent parade balloons among other apparitions, that consumes nearly a full half-hour, though it seems to go on much longer; it’s reminiscent of the similar set-pieces that closed both “Pixels” and “R.I.P.D.”—and you can understand how desperate and dire the result is when it invites comparisons to those massive duds. There’s also a bit in which the possessed Kevin turns all the police and soldiers amassed against him into a “Thriller”-like dance formation that seems to presage a gigantic dance sequence, but it never happens, suggesting that the filmmakers decided not to pile on a mistake they’ve already made by overusing the familiar music from the first film (Theodore Shapiro’s score is overall no prize). Instead they just add more cheesy effects before intercutting some predictably stale gags into the final credits to end the picture with the suggestion that a sequel might be forthcoming.

Throughout the movie the four leads gamely give their all, but it’s to no avail. McCarthy has worked well with Feig in the past—“Spy” was genuinely funny—but here’s she’s just one-note shrill, and whatever chemistry the director engendered between her and Wiig in “Bridesmaids” is lacking here, especially since Wiig plays Erin like a goofy fifties schoolgirl, drooling over Hemsworth’s hunky Kevin in a way that destroys even the slightest hint of feminism at work. McKinnon tries to emulate the eccentricity Murray brought to the first film as the gadget-crazed Holtzmann but comes off mostly irritating, while Jones is trapped in the stereotype of the brazen African-American woman with ’tude, to which the shopworn thirties cliché of the black who responds with bug-eyed fear to any unexpected occurrence is added. Hemsworth flails about trying to pull off Kevin’s klutzy shtick, and isn’t much better when the character’s possession turns the character into a powerful, supremely confident ghostmaster. He seems ill-at-ease in either pose.

The rest of the cast doesn’t matter much, except for the cameos by the stars of the original that are noteworthy only by reason of the audience recognition they cultivate rather than any laughs they generate; this is essentially an effects extravaganza, and apart from the first couple ghost appearances, when Feig actually opts to scare us at an amusement-park level (the 3D adding to the impact), the visual explosion isn’t especially effective. That’s particularly the case in the big final confrontation, when there’s obviously an effort to fashion some pleasantly strange images (as well as reintroducing some old friends) among the ghosts, but it all comes off feeling tired and familiar. What was surprising and fresh in 1984 has become ho-hum and musty in the intervening thirty-two years, and the gender change isn’t handled cleverly enough to revive it.

It might be noted in passing that even the chronology of the signage in the culminating battle is a mess, making you wonder if this is supposed to be a period piece. Theatre marquees advertising both “Fists of Fury” and “Willard” suggest things are happening in 1971, but there’s also an advertisement for “Taxi Driver,” which was released five years later. And yet there are officials representing the Department of Homeland Security on hand to cause the heroines trouble. Maybe the intent is to suggest that “Ghostbusters” is happening in some sort of timeless neverland, but like so much else in this misguided reboot, it merely adds to the conclusion that the movie should never have happened at all.