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Grade: C

Verdict: For "Phantom" lovers only.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who flock to Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical behemoth "The Phantom of the Opera," and those who flee it.

All you need to know about the movie "Phantom" is that it's pretty faithful to the mega-successful theatrical extravaganza, and it's been done about as well as it could be. Director Joel Schumacher, the man who gave Batman nipples, has made an honest, albeit kitschy, effort to capture whatever it is that's made "Phantom" such an enduring hit. (What's next? "Phantom on Ice"?)

Fans will swoon and weep; nonfans, should they accidentally find themselves in the same room with it, will snicker and snooze. Also, the fate of the ominous chandelier, which is the only thing many of us remember from the Broadway hit, has been moved from the end of the first act (so to speak) to near the end of the movie. Meaning, if that's the only reason you've bought a ticket, you'll have to sit through most of the movie's 141 minutes to see it (and you might want to, since the lighting fixture's big moment has been amped up to disaster-movie proportions, with crumbling walls and screaming extras).

The picture begins promisingly as the camera swoops down through a sepia-colored Paris, circa 1919, where the remnants of the once-grand Paris Opera are being auctioned off. One of the bidders is especially interested in a tiny monkey-propelled music box. Just about everyone is interested in the infamous chandelier, stashed in a corner and draped in white, looking for all the world like an octopus' ghost.

Then the cloth is lifted and the movie bursts into color as we're lifted back to the Opera's glory days in 1870. This is the movie at its best -- pulsating with the anticipation and energy of before-the-show backstage bustle. In a nice contrast between the glitter and the reality of show biz, an enormous painted elephant is turned around to reveal a tippling stagehand seated in its hollowed-out shell.

Which isn't such a bad analogy for the movie: an impressive and extravagantly designed spectacle, masking a hollow story and a thin score.

The plot boils down to a love triangle. Lovely, limpid-eyed chorus member Christine (lovely, limpid-eyed Emmy Rossum) has a voice the angels might envy. She also has a mysterious tutor who turns out to be the Opera's celebrated and much-feared Phantom (Gerard Butler), who lives beneath the theater in an underground grotto bordered by a stygian subterranean river.

Christine's other admirer is the handsome, wealthy Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Patrick Wilson), who, watching from his box, realizes she's his childhood sweetheart. Raoul is also the elderly gentleman we see at the auction, and the movie returns to him, from time to time, which only makes an overlong film even longer.

Providing a dollop of comic relief are Simon Callow and Ciaran Hines as the Opera's new owners. And Minnie Driver, overacting her butt off in hopes of an Oscar nomination, plays Carlotta, the troupe's reigning diva, whose inadequacies are telegraphed in much the same way Orson Welles revealed the shortcomings of Charles Foster Kane's mistress in "Citizen Kane." Namely, when she starts to sing, two stagehands up in the rafters hold their noses. Here, when Carlotta opens her mouth, the cleaning ladies put plugs in their ears.

The expected opening-up has been done. There's a duet on a snowy rooftop, a duel in a deserted graveyard and a back story for the Phantom that's like a Mad magazine parody of "The Elephant Man."

Butler lacks the voice of original Phantom Michael Crawford, but he looks better with his shirt half-open (after all, Crawford is now 62). And the Phantom's disfigurement has been toned way down; nothing's wrong that a little Clearasil or a facial peel couldn't help.

Wilson, so dynamic in the under-appreciated "The Alamo," is virile and has a good voice. But the role remains the same boring necessary evil it was on stage (no Raoul, no love triangle).

However, Rossum is a revelation. Probably best known as the murdered teen in "Mystic River," she has a classically trained voice (she's studied at the Met since she was 7) and an intoxicating offbeat beauty. More Jennifer Beals, say, than Jennifer Lopez.

Bottom line: If you love the show, you'll most likely love the movie. But if you think Webber's cash cow is a bloated monstrosity, well, there's always Lon Chaney.