This film follows Madonna on her 2004 Re-Invention world tour and shows her show, backstage, preparations and her experiences travelling around the different places around the world. I have never been to a gig that is as big as a Madonna show mostly I have been in mid-sized venues that are just about the music rather than being a spectacular event in the way that artists like Madonna, Prince and U2 are known for.
In this regard the film is pretty strong because it allows me to see the spectacle without having to pay the £50 and stand in a crowded auditorium. The musical numbers are impressive even if there weren't as many as I would have liked; I'm not a Madonna fan per se but she does have good tunes and her delivery is something else. The problem with the film is that it goes beyond the shows and behind the scenes with her, her family and her dancers. For me the problem was Madonna herself because she came across as rather insincere and rather full of emotional and spiritual babble. She shows this in the way she talks and the very New Age and American displays of emotion throughout some viewers will no doubt see this as honesty and frankness in front of the camera but for me it was liked they had cherry picked all the moments of forced sincerity and put them into the film (did I mention Madonna was the executive producer?).
This is bad for most of the film but is never worse than the final 20 minutes when she goes to Israel. This final section is pompous and so annoying that it almost totally cancelled out the musical numbers (which did seem to be long ago by this stage). It is hard to take her seriously she speaks to the dancers as if she were the wisest woman on earth (probably because her dancers seem to look at her as some sort of cross between Jesus and the Virgin Mother). I don't mean to be too hard because she occasionally is natural during the film (and God knows how she copes with that little b*stard Rocco smashing at everything every other minute) but the overall impression is one of insincerity, religious clichés and the sort of sentences that wouldn't seem out of place in very cheap fortune cookies.
Overall though, fans will love it because it is Madonna doing her thing on stage as well as being honest and "herself" behind the scenes. Those a little less blinded by adoration will still enjoy the stage shows but will probably struggle to swallow a lot of the behind the scenes stuff and religious babble. Madonna is a very talented entertainer who has lasted decades in an industry not designed for artist longevity and I applaud her for that; sadly this film only touches on that compared to the amount of time she spends coming off as the sort of American you would laugh at the second she walked away.
