‘Hamilton': Shallow, Dramatically Inept and Highly Overpraised [Review]

I’ve been holding off on reviewing “Hamilton” because, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less about it. Director Thomas Kali’s filmed stage play isn’t really cinema, it’s more like a filmed 160-minute document of the critically-acclaimed Broadway show. To call this a movie would do the entire art form a disservice, hell, it’s not even a documentary, it’s more like a digital video recording of a 2016 stage performance.

The emotional and intellectually distanced creator of the whole thing, one Lin-Manuel Miranda, has been overpraised by critics and given a key to the city of Hollywood. Call it perfect timing as Miranda and “Hamilton” came at a time when Obama was President and the seeds of “wokeness” were unsubtly being perpetuated in art all over the country.

Briefly, “Hamilton” is a treatment of the life of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers and the first secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Despite all that, it’s not really what you call a dramatic powerhouse, the lure of the whole thing feels more like a showcase to advance Broadway theater diversity via a clumsy racially-motivated gimmick.

“Hamilton” recasts American history by having the white Founding Fathers portrayed by Black and Latino actors. This stunt, because, frankly, let’s call it for what it is, didn’t work its magic on me, as it felt, Ideologically-speaking, like faux-art. Miranda uses Disney-approved hip-hop in the play, the kind of kitschy krumping that is far inferior to the notoriously brilliant and politically-striking poetry stylings of past groundbreakers such as Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur and, even, Kanye West. Don’t even put Miranda in the same breathe as these guys, his attempt at musicality in “Hamilton’ veers more towards safely conforming battle-rapping.

This revision of American history, as Hamilton (played by Miranda) comes to 18th-century America to go up against nemesis Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom, Jr.), tries to sell the American Revolution in a too-cool-for-school “Saturday Morning” rendering, the end result lacking any sort of modesty or critical self-awareness. If anything, the true magic act Miranda pulled off with his uber-popular creation is in how he managed to trick an entire country into thinking that “Hamilton,” a self-absorbed, dramatically inept play, is more important than it actually is.