El Cantante | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

Leon Ichaso's film soft-pedals everything save the language in what often resembles a made-for-cable biopic.

There is something entirely dead about Lopez's performance. No matter how superficially lively she makes it, she is always simply mouthing the lines. Never mind Jenny from the block. Jenny is the block. Of wood.

The film, however, beginning with a flashback to 1963, is a soft-pedalled account of Lavoe's rise to fame and his drug-related downfall that has more in common with the biopic parody Walk Hard than anything as muddy as real life.

It doesn't help that, in the title role, Marc Anthony has all the onscreen charisma of wet dough.

This messy, maudlin portrait of the decline and decline of Puerto Rico-born salsa star Hctor Lavoe wavers uncertainly between cable channel biopic and socially concerned drug movie.