The main characters don't provide chuckles or really elicit our love or contempt it's hard not to be ambivalent toward them. Some of the funniest work Dario has even done comes when he mocks the vulgarity of the opera society.
The secondary characters are used well though, societal parodies. The dialogue is definitely worse than the usual English as a second language stuff we get from Dario.
The most annoying aspect is that Sands has the special powers at the outset, but they mysteriously disappear when he needs them most as if they were provided by the Witchblade. The weakness of the movie, as usual, lies in the script. You can make a valid argument that certain unrealistic aspects don't add anything to the movie and/or simply dislike them, but things like electricity in the opera house were deliberate decisions that intentionally make it implausible in the sense of the real world. Both are bold visionary movies that are not trying to be realistic. Julie Taymor's ancient Rome is the only one that had cars and video games, but that doesn't stop most people from thinking Titus is a good flick. This is why the outside world isn't normal the two times we see it. The movie often succeeds in being darkly comedic, and the characters are only meant to be viewed in the sense of what the represent in the real world. This is Dario's world accept it or watch boring, visually stunted, formulaic directors rehash bad scripts in a conventional manner. Dario's pays great attention to detail when it comes to the look he wants, but seemingly could care less whether the set is plausible in the real world. Argento creates a bizarre underworld in the depths of the opera house that is original, but at the same time evokes memories of Jeunet & Caro's City Of The Lost Children and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Virtually the entire movie takes place within the opera house, but this is in no way limiting or constricting to the look of the film because this is Dario Argento we are talking about. What makes this worse is that a totally literate phantom still has almost no chance to utter any decent dialogue. The problem is Dario replaces the disfigurement with a raised by rats story, yet we get a Richard Gere type of suave, supposedly poetic phantom instead of an uneducated Christopher Lambert in Greystoke. Many people are up in arms that the phantom's face isn't disfigured, but that is not the problem. Thus, it should be expected to be true to the original only where the writers, Gerard Brach and Dario Argento, see fit. This is not a remake it's a reconceptualization.
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