Search - Xanadu [Blu-ray] on Blu-ray

B.J. W. (analogkid01) from CHICAGO, IL
Reviewed on 7/5/2025...

So, musicals. I can take 'em or leave 'em. There are a few that I really like - Little Shop of Horrors, the filmed performance of Sunday in the Park with George with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, Pink Floyd: The Wall, and of course, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which is an incredibly funny comedy and the music is half the reason.

Then there's Xanadu.

Olivia Newton-John (rest in peace) plays Kira aka Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dance. She appears on Earth and guides young painter Sonny (Michael Beck) in creating a new type of pan-generational dance club with an older jazz clarinetist Danny (Gene Kelly). Sonny is into rock, Danny loves big-band jazz. So they build their club, there's a big dance number at the end, Sonny *somehow* gets Kira permanently out of the heavenly realm so they can be together, the end.

Xanadu isn't a horrible movie, it's just surprisingly uneventful despite the music (by Jeff Lynne of ELO) and choreography. Musicals can be a lot of fun, but the musical interludes *must* keep the narrative moving forward. Xanadu fails entirely on this front. I was easily able to scrub forward through the musical numbers and not miss any of the story. Consider the aforementioned Little Shop of Horrors - the musical numbers introduce Seymour, Audrey and her dreams of "Somewhere That's Green," the sadistic dentist, Seymour's success due to Audrey II, and the final battle. If you skip the songs in LSoH, you miss out on character backstory and motivation. With Xanadu, that isn't the case. Even Grease, for crying out loud, ONJ's predecessor to Xanadu - the songs communicate important plot points and aren't just self-indulgent spectacle.

There's also a problem with the dialogue. I'd say maybe 70% of the scenes are ADR - automated dialogue replacement, which is a bit of a misnomer since there's nothing really "automated" about it, it's rather quite manual-laborious - but it's where they didn't capture dialogue on-set, so the actors all come back into recording booths and watch the film and repeat their lines while watching their lip movements on a screen. The technology and techniques have improved since 1980, but in older movies it can make the film feel pretty clunky, and that's the case here. Not only does the dialogue sound ADR'd, but it also feels rushed.

So yeah, watch Grease again instead. Or Walk Hard. Please see Walk Hard.

Grade: C-minus