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RATING:  
SINGAPORE : Losing a lead actor during filming always begets a fear of people lumping a huge biased chunk of sentimentality on the movie - instead of judging it on the actual quality of the film.
Especially when the actor in question is the charismatic Heath Ledger, whom many feel was an extraordinary talent taken well before his time.
So does Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, salvaged by ingeniously enlisting Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell to fill in Ledger's blanks, live up to the never-ending debatable brilliance of the artist-filmmaker?
Let's not forget that this is a man whose visual aesthetic and over-indulgent sensibilities has always trod the fine line between sensational and vulgar.
Imaginarium follows a re-jiggered story about a centuries-old travelling circus run by Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), who once made a deal with the devil (a wickedly cool Tom Waits) for immortality in exchange for his doll-like daughter (Lily Cole).
In desperation, Parnassus, along with midget-manager (Verne Troyer) and assistant (Andrew Garfield), recruits the mysterious amnesiac Tony (Ledger et al) to help collect more souls than the devil, so as to save his daughter's.
If you think of Parnassus as Gilliam - a visionary whose desire is to demonstrate his imagination to a world that often isn't capable of handling it - the overall idea of the Imaginarium being a place where you can decide the path your soul can take, might sound unnecessarily esoteric.
But Gilliam is an old hand at making the esoteric accessible (think Brazil, Fisher King) and his early Monty Python work shines through this whimsical journey, with possibly the flattest (and purposefully so) CGI in recent years.
It is this overly fantastical conscious effort that allows the commendable trio of Depp, Law and Farrell to consecutively and poignantly step in to play Tony in scenes so cleverly handled, you don't actually miss Ledger. But overall, it is still Ledger's effortless charm and seductive talent that centres an otherwise messy story caught up in its own unpolished script and sometimes muddled plot strands.
Judging from the credits and dedications, Imaginarium might appear more a memoriam than an actual movie.
But if you, like its characters, abandon yourself to the film, it is still one magical capricious ride worth taking.
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