I haven't seen the stage version of Jersey Boys so I'm at a bit of a loss to make a comparison to that. What research I've done on it tells me that it is a juke box musical that uses the popular tunes made famous by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to tell the story of their rise and fall and rise in a Rashomon like manner. It's been running almost ten years now and doesn't seem to have an end in sight. I can see the concept being very popular with baby boomers kind of how Mamma Mia is (just with a newly written story that incorporates ABBA's music).
The film version is directed by Clint Eastwood and I'm not sure if he needed the money or lost a bet or owed the Mafia money. The film version misfires in so many aspects it becomes more of a study on how not to adapt a popular stage musical to film (it reminded me of the paper I wrote in grad school doing comparisons between Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and Brian DePalma's film adapation using the novel, a couple of drafts of the script and the finished film...If I were still in school this film would present a great follow up to that paper).
Jersey Boys is little more than a typical "by the numbers" musical biopic that has little to offer in any way shape or form. Even most of the musical numbers that still remain (it seems the score has been gutted as the film barely seems like a musical at all) don't get completed. The acting ranges from adequate to weird (Christopher Walken seems to be playing a Xerox of a character he's played before while doing an impression of Christopher Walken).
This feels like a concept that wasn't fleshed out as the idea of the four band members each telling a part of their story but only seeing it from their side at the time is there (they do narrate, but there's no logic or consistency as to who narrates when). The story seems to skip all over the place and there is little sense of how much time passes between the start of the film in 1951 and the "epilogue" in 1990 beyond watching Valli's daughter grow up. There are huge gaps in the story (how many daughters does Valli have? when exactly and how did his marriage dissolve?) and the actors basically seem to age by growing facial hair and wearing wigs, but still looking the same age they did at the start. It's distracting.At the end of the film, one of the characters (I forget which) mentions the scene depicted in the poster above. We don't actually see that until the very end of the film, but he mentions it like we should have already seen it. And that's part of the problem. If it is a by the numbers biopic at the end of the day, the film makers forgot to include the odd numbers and left out the colors green and purple. There is little beyond the nostalgic appeal of the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Season to recommend this film and even that isn't played up as much as it should be.
There was a preview for an upcoming film about James Brown (called Get On Up) that played before this. That seemed like it would be more interesting. Let's hope that Clint Eastwood has a better film up his sleeve for his next film because this would be a bad place to end a distinguished directing career.
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