Extravagant eye candy

It has taken an awfully long time - 16 years, if you're counting - for this Phantom Of The Opera to emerge, blinking, into the daylight.

First mooted in the late Eighties when Andrew Lloyd Webber's blockbuster show was at the height of its success, the film had its world premiere in London last night, just in time to ride on the recent revival of the screen musical, post Chicago and Moulin Rouge, and to put in its own bid for the Oscars.

A wonderfully melancholy and atmospheric black-and-white prologue discovers the Paris Opera Populaire as a crumbling shell before the story leaps back several decades to the theatre's burnished heyday, circa 1870.

The building's dark secret: the disfigured genius who haunts its catacombs, only venturing out to whisk a young singer away to his watery lair and ravish her with the music of the night. She, in the end, must choose between his perverse and morbid allure and a wholesome (but boring) rival suitor.

To the loud disapproval of the stage production's legions of fans, its original stars, Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford, were thought too old to resume their roles. Instead, Emmy Rossum, just 18, makes a lovely, sweet-voiced ingenue, with stout comic relief from Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds as thrusting impresarios and from Minnie Driver as an Italian diva.

But Gerard Butler's Phantom is the film's most spectral feature. Hitherto best known for Dracula 2000 and the Lara Croft sequel, he lacks the dangerous sexuality crucial to the character.

And his unimpressive prosthetic make-up does him no favours; romantic not Gothic, the movie is much more comfortable when its hero is discreetly hidden behind his natty, white half-mask.

The director is Joel Schumacher who, after two unhappy forays into the Batman series, had previously announced his intention to return to edgy, low-budget work. Films such as Tigerland and Phone Booth delivered on that promise and, incidentally, launched Colin Farrell's international career. Here, though, Schumacher returns with a vengeance to extravagant eye candy.

And there's no doubt that Phantom looks absolutely gorgeous. But the theatrical setting, so ideal for the stage, often seems on screen a little cramped and airless. For all the lavish trappings, this is at heart an intimate drama and - unlike the epic 1996 movie of Lloyd Webber's Evita - the story, at 145 minutes, is hard-pushed to last the distance.