Verdict:
There are movies so iconic, everybody knows their names, and sometimes I wonder if those who joined the hype have actually seen the movie from start to finish. Singin’ in the Rain has its good moments, but holy moly, is it a mess of a movie.
The main romance in the film came out of nowhere. It has that age old cliché where two people do not like each other at first but then fall in love, except the cliché is executed very poorly. The dislike is unfounded and so forced that it seems like the female lead cannot act. After the initial dislike, there is no natural progression towards a warmer relationship. The romance is just as sudden and forced.
The story as a whole has a disorienting structure, getting interrupted by parts that do not belong there.
The film is saturated with little jokes and slapstick and almost none of that stuff is funny! After a while, the cretinous forced humour becomes painful. There is a character played by Donald O’Connor whose mission it is to be a harlequin high on speed. His line delivery is fine, and he can be funny but he just keeps clowning to the point that I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the mother f*cker.
The actors are definitely capable when they want to be. They sing and dance well. The physical gags look like they take a lot of skill. But the acting, singing and dancing are not tied together well. Look, if you wanted to make a few music videos, do it. Record an album. If you are making a film with a story, then it has to make some damn sense and the songs in it have to be related to the story. That is not the case here.
On top of that, the songs were not good either. There are two songs, Singin’ in the Rain and Good Morning (to a lesser degree), that are discernibly interesting. The rest are average, some with very primitive rhymes and of questionable purpose. There is one song that starts for no apparent reason and is not about anything, with its few lyrics being nonsensical babble. It is several minutes of your life you will never get back. The song could have been cut out of the film and the film would have lost NOTHING.
Moreover, the music is constantly being interrupted either for a change in tune, for another scene or for a dancing part. I like tap dancing as much as the next guy, but suddenly interrupting the music into which your brain is already tuned in feels horrible, like getting mentally slapped. These dancing parts are not brief pauses either; they last a while and they too get interrupted by slapstick or other dancing scenes. What a f*cking mess!
As the movie was drawing to a close, I was bored and tired of it (my partner tuned out after just 10 minutes). It was bouncing of the wall crazy and sucked the energy right out of me. The music is good, when not interrupted, the acting is good at times, but the structure is lacking. Next time someone asks me to watch this movie, they will need to get me high first, because clearly that is what the makers were when they made it.