Memo to Jennifer Lopez: the next time you find a screenplay that
seems like the perfect star vehicle for you and your spouse, avoid it
like a hypodermic needle in a subway bathroom. With memories of the
Bennifer-era still fresh in the public mind, her agent should have
discouraged her from co-starring in El Cantante with current
husband Marc Anthony. The movie wants to be an honest biopic on
pioneering 1970s salsa singer Hector Lavoe, but the stunt casting is so
distracting that is hard to think of the characters as anyone other
than Lopez and Anthony. That’s not helped by the fact this is a
depressing story about two unlikable people — Lopez’s starring role as
a whining, domineering drug-addict isn’t going to do her any favors.
Lopez and Anthony are not terrible actors (Lopez’s limited range worked to her advantage in
Out Of Sight; Anthony gave a startling performance in Martin Scorsese’s muddled
Bringing Out The Dead).
Here the pair are lost in a movie with no sense of pacing and an
overabundance of shock tactics. Lavoe’s life is a standard tale of the
Icarus-celebrity who flies high and is ruined by addiction. Director
Leon Ichaso seems to forget that the pain of the fall is best viewed in
contrast to the joy of the rise. There is no joy in this story; for the
bulk of the running time audiences are forced to watch Lopez and
Anthony move from one tragedy to the next. No supporting character is
developed beyond being set up to die, every scene is over-directed in
glossy MTV-style, and a never-ending stream of musical sequences do
little more than mercilessly extend the running time. It’s hard to care
at all about the central characters by the — and that statement should
not suggest a moral complexity along the lines of Raging Bull.
El Cantante is a misfire, pure and simple.