Annie

It’s been a great year for musicals - in that there hasn’t been many. Rio 2 and The Book of Life are animations, so they get a pass. Begin Again, Get On Up, and Jersey Boys are about musicians and only sing when performing, so they get a pass. The Muppets Most Wanted has the Muppets, so they get a pass. The only real musical we had was the jukebox travesty Walking On Sunshine, which was so bland that it was easily forgotten. Here we are, eleven-and-a-half months later and we’re left pretty much unscathed, having escaped that dreaded feelings boredom and embarrassment that come with watching the horrible genre.

But Annie – a remake, a remake of a musical, and a remake of a musical starring Jamie Foxx (it’s the perfect storm of horror) – was always looming on the horizon, sitting there like a big, fat… musical, threatening to ruin Christmas. Thank the stars then that this update is a relatively painless experience. In fact, it’s quite pleasant and neither boredom nor embarrassment featured during the breezy one-hundred-and-eighteen minutes.

Annie (Wallis) is a foster kid sharing a crowded room with five other girls, in care together only because Cameron Diaz’s nasty drunk can collect a weekly cheque. When rich businessman Will Stacks (Foxx) saves Annie from being knocked down, the incident helps his bid for mayor in the upcoming election. Seizing the potential to wangle even more votes, slimy campaign manager Guy (a wonderful Bobby Cannavale), encourages Will to foster Annie, who uses Will’s connections to search for her real parents.

“I said no singing and dancing,” Cameron Diaz (having real fun playing the monster) screams at her wards during the hip hop version of A Hard Knock Life and Friends With Benefits and Easy A director Will Gluck seems to take that to heart: the musical sequences here are very short with little or no choreographed dancing. This may irk the purists (those depraved unfortunates) but what it does is let the story shine through.

And Annie, despite one dimensional characters and convenient plotting, has a tender one. Foxx and Wallis, the latter showing that Beasts of the Southern Wild was no fluke, enjoy a slow burning chemistry, keeping the cringe at bay until right at the end.

It’s a musical but it’s okay.