Newsies Review

Disney lost most of a fifteen million dollar budget here, and the reasons are easy to list and slightly beside the point. The book is thin. A newsboys' strike shrinks to a handful of speeches about family, the romance with Sarah has no pulse at all, and Robert Duvall plays Pulitzer like a man contractually obliged to be in the room. Christian Bale, eighteen and visibly annoyed at having to sing, gets through Santa Fe on conviction rather than tone, and his Lower East Side accent slides back toward Wales whenever a line runs long.

The dancing is what works. Kenny Ortega shoots Seize the Day and the tap break across the restaurant tables in King of New York in wide held frames with the entire company inside them, so the leaps read as bodies doing difficult things in real space rather than as ten cuts a second. Alan Menken's melodies are sturdier than Jack Feldman's lyrics sitting on them. At two hours the picture keeps stopping for Ann-Margret's vaudeville turn and for plot it has already covered, and the strike is won in a rush when the city's other working children walk out and Pulitzer folds, with Governor Roosevelt arriving by carriage afterwards to arrest the warden, which is not a resolution anybody in the film earned.