Chicago (15)

More tricks than tunes

Frenetic in pace and attack, Chicago practically bursts its garters trying to razzle and dazzle you. The movie, adapted from the 1975 stage production that's been enjoying a monster revival on Broadway and in the West End, has a headlong purl and dash that won't take no or even a "hmm, maybe" for an answer. Its high-kicking, tough-talking style is of a sort that wants to be called "irresistible", and for a while you may feel jostled along by its lapel-grabbing urgency. But I don't think it will last, because there's only so much jostling a body can take.

A musical satire on the perishable nature of celebrity, the story concerns a simultaneous rise and fall. On the way down is Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones), a showgirl who's gone from vamping on nightclub stages to shooting dead her cheating husband and now awaits trial on the prison's "murderess row". On the way up is stage-struck wannabe Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger), another man-killer for whom the slippery attorney Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) has stepped into the breach, putting Velma's case on hold simply because Roxie offers fresher notoriety and fatter paychecks. Upon this merry-go-round of vicious opportunism the characters pose and preen, sashaying in silhouette against cellblock windows or prancing like marionettes under the expert manipulation of the attorney.

Where Fred Ebb's lyrics once declared that life was a cabaret, in Chicago he pounds out the idea of life as warped showbiz. Justice and morality mean nothing in a world that just craves the old "razzle-dazzle", and between them Roxie and Billy work a fiendish pas de deux that runs rings around whatever the law can throw at them. Ebb's lyrics are at their most gleefully poisonous in the why-oh-why tirade of "Class": "There ain't no gentleman who's fit for any use,/ And any girl'd touch your privates for a deuce./ And even kids'll kick your shins and give ya sass./ Nobody's got no class./ All you read about today is rape and theft./ Jesus Christ! Ain't there no decency left?" Yet however much one admires the punch of the lines, you'd be stuck to recall its tune. The songs of Chicago are witty, acidic and raucously in-your-face; what they're not, aside from the opening blast of "All That Jazz", is memorable.

The dancing is supple and athletic in the trademark style of Bob Fosse, though whereas one thrilled to the choreography on stage, director Rob Marshall relies here on trick editing and computerised imagery to lend an extra sheen of slickness. It belongs very much to the Moulin Rouge school of hoofing, where the smoke-and-mirrors of the cutting room effectively camouflage most of the dancers' efforts. Sometimes there is nothing more exciting, or more moving, than the sight of two people moving across a dancefloor, but the magic evaporates once technology gets in on the act. Even with that technology, certain sequences really aren't up to snuff: when Flynn finds himself in a tight spot during his defence of Roxie, Marshall cuts back and forth between Gere tap-dancing alone on stage and flannelling the jury in court, his fancy footwork analogous to his oratorical chicanery – only it isn't, it's just an indifferent exhibition of tap-dancing.

There is the further problem of its unvarying tone. In Cabaret, Kander and Ebb put a society on trial as the decadent Weimar republic capitulates to the onslaught of Nazism, and with it one felt a sense of romance and gaiety irretrievably lost. Chicago also takes a society to task, but this time there is no tragic, or even tragicomic, aspect to the corruption, because in 1930s Chicago nothing is at stake. This is a town of stone killers, sexual predators, venal attorneys, unscrupulous hacks and a mob hungry for sensation and gossip; even the innocent, such as Roxie's cuckolded husband (John C Reilly), are pathetic dopes who live to be ignored ("Mr Cellophane" is his wimpish lament). There is nobody to cheer for in this Midwest Gomorrah – worse, there is nobody even to like.

Scenically, the film looks a little drab, too, because so much of it is set in prison, where Roxie and Velma fantasise and plot their next moves, sponsored by a scheming warden (Queen Latifah) who's on the make like everyone else. I grew weary of the same old shots of nightclub stages on which a single red spotlight picks out one of the principals as she's cavorting through another number. Fair play to Catherine Zeta Jones and Renée Zellweger, who perform like troupers from beginning to end and make a nice contrast with one another: Zeta Jones's long-legged, Louise Brooks-type vamp against Zellweger's pert, apple-cheeked upstart. But given that they both disport themselves for much of the time in their underwear, they're mysteriously unsexy – the look says "come hither", but it means "get lost". In between them Gere wears his boxy double-breasted suits and snap-brimmed hats with an insouciant cool, though the jury's still out on his singing and dancing. As Gene Kelly once said, if it looks like work, you ain't working hard enough.

As a reproduction of the stage show, Chicago isn't bad, but it makes no persuasive case for itself as a film. There's an awful lot of huff and puff, and on occasion the cast bends over backwards, literally, to convince us that we're having a good time. I came out with a few good lines swimming around my head ("Screwin' around – like foolin' around, without dinner") but virtually unable to whistle a tune. And if it's a Christmas song'n'dance treat you need, there's always Singin' in the Rain.