Grade: D

It’s truly frightening. Not the old Gaston Leroux novel about the mysterious figure that haunts the Paris Opera–that’s more camp than classic. Nor any of the myriad versions of it that have been made for the big screen or television–not even the 1925 Lon Chaney epic, which remains great fun but is hardly terrifying. No, what’s really frightening are two names–Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher. Each alone is sufficient to cause an involuntary shudder in anybody with an iota of good taste. But the thought of them combined ups the effect exponentially. It’s the mixture of Lloyd Webber’s slick banality and Schumacher’s wild flamboyance that makes this long-gestating filmization of the inexplicably successful stageshow, which has been playing nonstop on Broadway since 1988 and spawned a small army of touring companies, so frightful in every sense of the word. On the boards “The Phantom of the Opera” was bloated kitsch; now, thanks to Schumacher, it’s hysterically bloated kitsch.

With some rearranging–the famous chandelier crash is moved from the first act close to the big finale, for example–and some not-always well-advised additions, like periodic returns to the later period in which the show begins before flashing back to the central story, the movie is a quite faithful transposition of the stage musical to the screen. Certainly none of the sung-through score appears to have been cut. That’s not much of a blessing, however, since Lloyd Webber’s habit of endlessly repeating his limited number of melodies gets tiresome even if one likes them the first time around (Wagner didn’t apply the leitmotif principle with such dedication) and the lyrics are even more puerile than remembered. Nor is there any significant alteration in the goofily romantic, Beauty-and-the-Beast retread he fashioned from Leroux’s gorier potboiler. The tale of the disfigured genius who lives in the catacombs beneath the Opera and tutors a young member of the chorus whom he intends to make not only the company’s star soprano but his lover as well–only to have his hopes shattered when her childhood friend, the nobleman Raoul, becomes his romantic rival–remains hokum in the purest form, suffused with music that’s a potpourri of elements, from faux opera to patter songs reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan to big Broadway ballads. Still, audiences have responded with rapturous acceptance to what should, if quality were the determining factor, have been a floperetta (to use the Broadway jargon), so the content of this “Phantom” will hardly displease the already addicted. (Whether it will expand the current fan base is entirely another question: newcomers are unlikely to be bowled over by the gooey mixture of schmaltz and throbbing emotionalism).

The more serious question is how well Schumacher’s picture presents the material. It’s certainly a lush production, in which the design (Anthony Pratt, John Fenner, Paul Kirby), sets (Celia Bobak) and costumes (Alexandra Byrne) are all very opulent (though often excessively busy) and the cinematography (John Mathieson) equally plummy. But what’s going on in front of all the elaborate backdrops is less impressive. The three leads sing well enough, but none exhibits any real charisma. Gerard Butler makes a curiously bland Phantom, never mustering the commanding presence that’s needed; and Patrick Wilson can’t give much to the stock figure of Raoul (certainly one of the most inept excuses for a hero ever created) beyond a boyish handsomeness. As for Emmy Rossum as Christine Daae, the female member of the romantic triangle, she evinces a winsome look but a plastic personality–the role might as well be played by a wax statue from Madame Tussaud’s. Meanwhile the usually forceful Miranda Richardson is almost anonymous as Christine’s guardian Mme. Giry. One shouldn’t blame the actors overmuch, though, since they’re hostage to Schumacher’s conception–and he, remember, is the fellow who destroyed the “Batman” franchise with his odd penchant for melding long dull patches with hyper-stylized and hyper-kinetic bursts of splashy razzmatazz. Here we find a similarly peculiar blend. Large portions of “Phantom” (big duets especially) are staged at a somber, almost glacial pace, but elsewhere–especially in the bigger production numbers–Schumacher and editor Terry Rawlings opt for a kind of rapid over-cutting that spotlights some really bizarre inserts. The worst examples are two of the show’s poorest songs, “Masquerade” and “Point of No Return,” both of which are made so jagged by the pointless exhibitionism of the camerawork that they become visually exhausting. (The repeated cutaways to the oddly-costumed dancers in the latter number–who look like refugees from an S&M bar–are particularly clumsy, and rather ugly.)

So are there any pleasures to be found in this “Phantom”? Of course. Minnie Driver manages some easy laughs as the company’s reigning Italian diva, a prima donna in every sense of the term. And Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds have a field day as the Opera’s new owners, providing a desperately needed spark (and a rare sense of fun) to the proceedings in their patter songs. The sound is excellent, too, for which Tony Dawe, Andy Nelson and Anna Behlmer are responsible. That’s not an insignificant element in a project like this.

But on the whole while devotees may be satisfied, it’s probable that most viewers coming to “The Phantom of the Opera” for the first time are going to leave wondering what all the fuss has been about for the last two decades. The picture opens with a scene set in 1919, where the remnants of the company are being sold off at auction; and one of the items on the block is the wreckage of the chandelier that came crashing down in what’s described as “the famous disaster” of forty-nine years earlier. Perhaps down the line in 2053 people will be using the identical words to hearken back to this big, bombastic bore of a movie, which isn’t likely to be of any help in reviving the movie musical–a genre which, despite “Chicago,” is still on life support.

Grade: D

It wasn’t a bad idea to hire Bill Murray to do the voice of Garfield, Jim Davis’ fat, lazy comics cat, in this big-screen debut for the now-CGI feline. Murray has the smarmy, deadpan tone that fits the part (much as Lorenzo Music did in the old TV cartoon). It would have been a better idea, though, to give him some amusing lines to recite. As he’s demonstrated all too often in the past, Murray can’t invigorate poor material through delivery alone, and he certainly doesn’t do so in this instance. Despite his presence, “Garfield: The Movie” is frantic but flat, a picture so neutered and declawed that even toddlers will find it too bland for their taste.

One of the problems inherent in adapting a daily comic strip for the screen, of course, is that you have to fashion a story to link together the jokes, and the one devised by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow (“Toy Story,” but also “Cheaper by the Dozen”) is about as predictable as you can get. Garfield enjoys the life of Riley dominating his affable owner Jon (Breckin Meyer), but the guy is so infatuated with vet Liz (Jennifer Love Hewitt) that he lets her persuade him to adopt a dog, too. Thus is Odie added to the family–to Garfield’s consternation. Curiously, unlike all the other critters in the movie–mongrels, felines and rodents (the movie might have been titled “Cats, Dogs and Rats”)–Odie can’t talk, but he does dance, a talent that catches the eye of Happy Chapman (Stephen Tobolowsky), a villainous local TV host who wants to kidnap the mutt and use him as his ticket to network stardom. When Garfield locks Odie out of the house, the pup winds up in Chapman’s cruel hands, and the feline goes off to rescue him. The final reels are taken up with the chase, culminating in a rather tasteless bit–given today’s climate–in which Garfield monkeys with the controls at a train terminal, putting various locomotives on collision courses. Need we add that everything turns out all right, especially after all the species team up to defeat Happy? (There has to be a message about teamwork in here too, of course.)

It should be obvious that Cohen and Sokolow have taken the easiest possible route in designing this scenario. In the process they’ve jettisoned whatever sharpness Davis’ strip might contain–and that’s not much to begin with–in favor of family-friendly pablum. The direction by Pete Hewitt, who previously did the undistinguished kiddie flicks “Tom and Huck” and “The Borrowers,” seems slack and enervated even in the most desperate action sequences, but that might partially result from the fact that he has to build much of the picture around the computer-generated title figure and lots of trained animals, along with humans interacting with them–always a complicated and difficult business. It’s understandable that the actors suffer from the same complexities. Nonetheless Meyer is probably the perfect choice for Jon, who in the strip is the most vacuous fellow imaginable; Meyer’s natural insipidity fits him well. Of course, in the newspapers Jon never gets a decent date, but that wouldn’t do in the movie, so cute Liz is attracted to his pleasant obtuseness as much as he is to her sweet cheer; Hewitt plays her with a total blankness that suggests there’s absolutely nothing going on behind her eyes. Poor Tobolowsky is saddled with an even unhappier role, and he responds by chewing up the scenery relentlessly; it’s certainly no help that he must also play, in mercifully brief snippets, his twin brother, a newscaster sporting a bad toupee. Tobolowsky is an actor with a tendency to irritate if not reined in, and in this instance he’s prodded instead.

To be fair, the computer animation in “Garfield” is of excellent quality. The feline moves nicely, and he’s integrated well into the live action. (He has a tendency to break into song and/or dance too often, but that’s hardly the fault of the effects team from Pixel Magic.) But like Murray’s voice contribution, the technical wizardry counts for little in the absence of good writing. Still, there is one line Murray delivers late in “Garfield” that inadvertently sums up the movie. As the cat is tossed into a cage at the animal pound late in the action, he complains, “This is all a terrible mistake.” Indeed.

One can, however, point to a small saving grace to this misfire. Fox is preceding the picture with a 2002 short featuring Scrat, the prehistoric rodent from “Ice Age,” called “Gone Nutty,” in which the little fella’s insatiable longing for one more acorn leads to a change in the whole global environment. Scrat’s an amusing creation, sort a computer-generated variant of Wile E. Coyote, and he manages to deliver more laughs in a mere four minutes than Garfield does in over an hour. Of course, whether “Nutty” alone is worth your hard-earned dollars is doubtful. “Garfield” certainly isn’t.