Burlesque is a quasi-musical comedy starring Cher, Christina Aguilera, Cam Gigandet, Stanley Tucci, Alan Cumming, Eric Dane, Kristen Bell, and Peter Gallagher.
Ali (Aguilera) is a small-town girl living in a lonely world. She takes a...bus to LA in an ill-defined bid to be a singer or dancer, strikes out, but then blunders into a club imaginatively called "Burlesque" just in time to catch the opening number, performed by the club's owner, Tess (Cher). She is immediately taken with this place and winds up pressuring the bartender Jack (Gigandet) for a job, and eventually auditions for and secures a place onstage.
In the meanwhile, she winds up living on Jack's couch because she is an idiot and keeps her money in her toilet tank and it gets stolen like obviously. Anyway, she blackmails him out of his own room when Jack's fiancee (Dianna Argon), back in New York, stops paying her side of the rent and he needs her help to keep his place. There's obvious attraction between them, but Jack sticks to his relationship with Natalie.
Meanwhile, Tess persistently ignores the fact that the club is about to get taken by the bank. Her very well-meaning ex-husband Vince (Gallagher) is trying desperately to save it; Tess would rather be snarky and actually run the club, and her assistant Sean (Tucci) doesn't help matters by saying silly things like "money is just a number." You might be thinking that this money subplot is going to get solved by an easy fix close to the end of the movie! You'd be right.
Our antagonists are Marcus (Dane), the rich doofus who's in the club every night but actually wants to destroy it and build apartments and Nikki (Bell), another dancer who winds up too drunk to perform sometimes and whose spot Ali winds up taking.
Anyway, Ali starts dating Jack, Natalie shows up and claims he never broke up with her, I think we're supposed to think that she's lying but he never provides a real explanation, but whatever, Jack and Ali wind up together at the end and Ali performs "Show Me How You Burlesque," which in the fiction Jack wrote. Credits! Oh, Alan Cumming is here, too, as the doorman and sometime performer.
So, this is not a good movie. It's fun in places, it's nice popcorn, but it makes me a little sad because it could have been so much better. Aguilera can act as well as she needs to for this movie, and although I'm not a big fan of her music, you can't deny that the girl can sing. The supporting cast 100% carries the movie, Stanley Tucci and Cher especially. I'd love for Cumming's performance of "That's Life" to have been in the movie (it's on the DVD), but the movie didn't need to be any longer.
I wish it would have focused more on the club, its history, its people and their found family, and less on being a Christina Aguilera vehicle. Likewise, I wish it would have either had the guts to commit to being a musical or not, but having a couple of numbers that leaned into the comedy aspects of burlesque would have been nice.
It's not a good movie, it's not terrible, it's just kinda shallow, and I'm not going to fault it for that. Just not my particular brand of popcorn.
My Grade: C
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (unless my shipment from Gruv gets here before we watch it)
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