Emmy Rossum (Shameless) and Gerard Butler (talentless) star in this 2004 adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that has been running on the West End since 1986. After watching the film you’ll swear it was longer.

Set in a Parisian opera house in 1870, Phantom of the Opera follows chorus girl Christine (Rossum) as she comes face to face to face with the masked man (Butler) who lives in the catacombs and has essentially been grooming her since childhood. Before you can say, “He’s here! The Phantom of the Opera!” (a line so good they say it twice in the film), Christine finds herself at the centre of a love triangle between the phantom menace and the phantom personality (Patrick Wilson).

The lavish Beauty and the Beast-inspired production is effectively directed by Joel Schumacher, chosen not just because he has the Two-Face makeup and enormous statues left over from Batman Forever, but because his anachronistic aesthetics are well suited to Lloyd Webber’s stylistically confused yet enduringly strong musical numbers. This includes a wild mix of accents (often by the same character), though the central young couple are American, in order to denote that they are in fact the heroes and not some confused people who have wandered in off the street.

It is through that lens that we witness Christine very bravely and inertly steal the soprano role from an actually qualified opera singer (Minnie Driver), a prima donna who must be punished for her hideous age (34) and indeterminate nationality. Driver’s performance is quite mad but she at least plays into the knowing camp of a Schumacher movie, while Christine is such a wet blanket that you keep expecting someone to bundle her into a bucket at the side of the stage.

She is visited by an “Angel of Music” who tutors her opera career at the behest of Madame Giry (Miranda Richardson), Christine’s surrogate mother and the head of a literal underground grooming ring. But Christine never considers the possibility that her invisible singing teacher and the resident theatre ghost might be the same person, making her the dumbest opera singer since Linda from The Traitors.

Butler meanwhile appears to have been vocal trained by Pierce Brosnan. The action movie mainstay is a bizarre choice to play the title character, since the only phantom-like thing about him is a singing ability. Butler’s one-note performance (if you can even call his yelling a note) fails the most basic task of making the cellar-dweller seem intimidating, let alone conveying the tragic side implied by his Elephant Man backstory.

Still, it would be unfair to lump this in with the worst of Lord “flew in from New York to vote to cut tax credits for the poor” Lloyd Webber. It’s not nearly as bad as Cats.