Late Movie Review 2 of 7…

Les Miserables – released December 5th, 2012

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, talented newcomers like Eddie Redmayne & Aaron Tveit, and several Broadway vets.

Plot WITH SPOILERS!: Valjean (Jackman) is on parole, Javert (Crowe) is the police inspector dedicated to finding Valjean and putting him back in prison.
Valjean becomes the mayor of a town and helps out Fantine (Hathaway) a single mother to Cosette (Seyfried), who sells ALL her body parts to earn money to raise her. Fantine ends up dying & Valjean becomes Cosette’s guardian.
Cosette grows up, meets Marius (Redmayne), a revolutionary student planning to rebel against the French monarchy with his friends, they fall in love, which is really too bad because his best lady friend Eponine is already in love with him, but oh well. The fight against the French monarchy doesn’t go so well and all of Marius’ friends die, including Eponine. Marius almost dies, but is saved by Valjean, who also has a chance to kill Javert, who has been hunting him this whole time, but doesn’t. Javert doesn’t know how to deal with the split in his moral compass, he wants to keep hunting Valjean because it’s the “right thing to do”, but now he owes him a solid because he let him live. In order to escape this confusion, he decides to kill himself. Marius and Cosette get married. Valjean dies. There is singing. The End.

My opinon/rating: Eh. As you can probably tell by my overly enthused description of the plot, I don’t care a whole heck of a lot for the story of Les Mis. I enjoy the music, but the story itself doesn’t really have a special place in my heart. I thought this was a well done version, I just don’t have a personal connection to it, so it’s not one of my favorite movies. If you’re not really into musicals, I’d probably skip this one since there’s little to no dialogue, it’s JUST singing. All in all, this movie gets a B rating.