Fame: Critic Reviews

NYC high school students sing, dance, emote in acting classes, and otherwise insist that America's got talent, but this unnecessarily tepid, conservative remake of 1980's far more famous and affecting original Fame suggests otherwise.

Suffers from a surfeit of flash, it nonetheless offers the undeniable power of young performers pursuing art at peak dexterity.

The awful truth about no one from the Fame movie or TV show going on to become famous may not yet have dawned on the cast of this new and bizarrely pointless remake.

Fame offers slick entertainment with some exuberance, but it's devoid of soul or heart.

Lives are spared in this sugarless new version of Alan Parker's movie and the TV show it spawned. But innocent songs and unsuspecting dance routines are hacked to bits.

Mullally has the most poignant moment, admitting to her students that the reason she teaches is because fame, for her, just wasn't in the cards. (Stardom, more than in the first film, is golden here.)

The production numbers are great, sometimes jaw-droppingly so.

The new Fame is a sad reflection of the new Hollywood, where material is sanitized and dumbed down for a hypothetical teen market that is way too sophisticated for it. It plays like a dinner theater version of the original.

It's almost fatally modest. But it has a sweet spirit, and it offers only one true moment of inadvertent camp: a (lame) finale featuring an African dance routine completely at odds with all the white bread we've just been served.

The high school is so sanitized that there are no drugs, cutthroat competition, or-inconceivably for a theatrical milieu-no gay students.

As a demo reel showcasing seven promising young talents from their freshman through senior years, it's pleasant enough. As a movie dramatizing the talent and dedication required to make it, the Fame reboot has fleet feet but lacks heart.

The picture is fitfully effective, but the story disappears in the editing bay. The movie has about as much heft as watching jesters and fire eaters at a village fair.

First-time filmmaker Kevin Tancharoen struggles to flesh out the 10 characters we meet during their freshman year at PA.

A watered-down tone ... causes the movie to drift dramatically between its musical and dance sequences.

A desperate, cynical -- and most likely unsuccessful -- attempt by a dying studio to stave off oblivion by jumping on the High School Musical bandwagon, exploiting one of its legacy titles in ways that dishonor the original.

This Fame is a film without the guts to show Idolized America that, as Debbie Allen so memorably said way back when, "Fame costs, and right here's where you start paying."

That fame seems assured to those who merely crave it -- without sacrifice, or spiritual and physical effort -- emerges as the underlying message in this sanitized and unrewarding production. Simon Cowell has much to answer for.

There are six new songs in the remake, but not one makes any impact, or is likely to end up as the ring tone of 2010.

A cheesy production with underdeveloped characters that feels more like a TV pilot than a self-contained motion picture.

Rated PG, it's almost laughably bland and watered-down in its desire to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Familiar? Yes, but not nearly as vapid as most of the musical material out there that encourages teens to believe fame is all that matters.

"Already?" the woman behind me said plaintively when the words "Sophomore Year" flashed up on the screen. That's the joy of this Fame. Like the old ones, it convinces you that high school, if not life, should go on forever.

Fails to make a significant mark.

absolutely shameless in its sadistic trotting-out of every single rabbit in the tiny teen-pageant top hat.