Yet another musician-based biopic, sad but true. It's a musical recreation of early recording artists at Chess Records circa 1950-1960's, the Chicago Blues' holiest temple. Marquee roles include Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Etta James, Howlin' Wolf and Chuck Berry. Pulling strings from behind the glass is owner/macher, Leonard Chess. Unfortunately, Hollywood can even f**k up the blues. In it's profligate grab for cash, the executives seem to have found a formula which entails hiring music and film stars to pose and emote for an hour and a half in order to sell a soundtrack. Do they teach this stuff at USC film school? Or does the new breed bypass appreciation of the medium altogether? Is it all dollars and cents? For every good bit of casting, such as Jeffrey Wright in the role of Muddy Waters, there are countless others who flail around, mug, grimace, bleed, and of course sing. Adrian Brody will not remember this role as a hallmark in his career. At what point did the director, Darnell Martin, throw up her hands and quit caring? Contracting Beyonce to fill the role of Etta James is like casting a Persian kitten with dyed tips to play a bloody-mouthed mother lion growling her need across the hot nighttime skies. Whoever made this movie should be ashamed. Hell, I'm ashamed and I only watched it.
This movie is so bad it will probably make money. The producers know their market: youthful audiences aroused by celebrity casts (Mos Def, Beyonce), and older fans enticed by the Blues legends of their youth. We need look no farther than the recent box office success of similar films including Taylor Hackford's "Ray," James Mangold's "I Walk the Line," and Bill Condon's "Dreamgirls." Each one focusing on the recording industry with its supply of soundtrack hits, stars and prestigious awards. This movie sips from that same well.
Cadillac Records borrows heavily from those films, but lacks any focus. It's a compendium of characters, songs, sub-plots in search of a main thread. They'd probably have achieved their ends more successfully by making "Muddy," thereby concentrating on one major luminary instead of an entire stable of acts. Or "Etta," since R and B is a more commercially popular and viable commodity in 2009 than the three-chord limitations of Chicago Blues. In fact Cadillac Records tried to fit about 5 biopics into one, which was an unfortunate conception.
A tribute lounge band in Las Vegas gives more integrity to the Chicago legends than this movie does. There's something so soulless and imitative about it, as if it were written, filmed, edited and finished by a cell of marketing executives bent on scraping every last dollar out of its tired carcass.
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