YMMV / Les Misérables (1998)

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Not being the much-awaited film of the 1980s musical may actually have hurt its box office. That would take 14 years more.
• Broken Base: For fans of the book/musical/etc. there's a bit of Critical Dissonance going on.
  • Do the changes to the ending result in a Broken Aesop or not?
  • Is this a solid film in its own right, however far it strays from the source material, or is it pure Adaptation Decay and a complete travesty?
• Designated Hero: One of the biggest criticisms of the film is how Valjean's actions make him rather hard to root for. He punches Bishop Myriel when trying to rob his silver cutlery, slaps Cosette when she calls him out for refusing to tell her anything of his past life, and does nothing when Javert commits suicide in front of him before walking away with a smile on his face.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: From Batman Begins, also starring Neeson: "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you."
• Ho Yay
  Javert: I will never stop. I will never let you go. Understand?
• Questionable Casting: John McGlynn, who plays Carnot (the man mistaken for Valjean), looks nothing like Liam Neeson so it's difficult to believe that anyone would get the two confused.
• So Okay, It's Average: Most reviews found it good enough, "perfectly respectable" as Roger Ebert put it, with particular praise going to Neeson and Rush. But many also said that at the end of the day, it couldn't shake the feeling that it was just the latest of many live-action versions of the novel. And so it's kind of a footnote nowadays. Years later, the film of the musical got a lot more attention for being, well, the film of the musical instead of yet another film of the book.

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