Movie Details
Movie: Disenchanted (2022)
Director: Adam Shankman
Cast: Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, Maya Rudolph
Genres: Musical/Comedy
Release date: 16 November 2022
IMDB Rating: 5.6/10
Languages: English, Spanish, Desencantada, and Traditional Chinese.
Duration: 1h 59m
Trailer
Synopsis
Want a shortened version so you don’t suffer? But sure, said the magic receiver. Fifteen years ago, Magical Romance was a surprise for me, a progressive and modern Disney fairy tale that was created long before the much tighter and more boring reboots of mouse classics. Amy Adams was magical, Patrick Dempsey charming, dialogue sharp, and songs like from The Best Musical of the Year. Speculation about a sequel began at the moment when this unexpected hit destroyed the box office, but the screenwriters somehow failed to follow up on “and they lived happily ever after”. And that’s why we waited half a decade to get… the fourth Matrix.
No, no kidding. I wanted to turn off the cursed romance at regular intervals after the first half hour because I did not believe that someone could sink so deeply in terms of craftsmanship and thought. The first 30 minutes are a marital debacle in which every innocent child must naturally get lost. It’s as if the creators expected that only those eight-year-old girls, who have grown up in the trying twenty-five years of life, who know how life goes, will watch the film. And so they won’t mind watching a sad Giselle, a stressed-out Robert, and a spunky teenager Ruby move from New York to the suburbs to rekindle their magical happy ending. The viewer expecting a scathing but still, fairy-tale romance receives one slap after another in the opening, as if Aronofsky took the whole concept and tried to drag the confused viewer through the crushed glass of naive expectations.
I’ve been patiently waiting to see where it all goes, actually, just like in the opening of The Matrix Resurrections, you wait for Neo to finally come to his senses and light up in his head for the real show to begin. And she begins, literally with the wave of a magic wand. Giselle decides to turn the clichéd town into a magical realm, so we suddenly find ourselves in a pastel medieval world with a magic mirror, an evil queen, scheming villains, and an ever-present curse in the background, which turns Giselle step by step into an evil stepmother. The craft level of the entire film at that moment drops somewhere to Princess from the Mill, and I’m talking about costumes and gimmicks, please. Patrick Dempsey’s fight as a valiant knight with a punkish CGI dragon (I don’t know how else to describe it) will be etched in my mind forever. The last time I saw something so ugly was in The Goat’s Tale,
Amy tries and play and sing for her life, but the material is lousy and it irritates her feet. It’s not so much that the Giselle from Diblík is playing a lot worse at the threshold of fifty, but here the choreography or camera work is half as good. Everything is strangely stiff and hastily sloppy at the same time. The highlight of everything is the songs that can’t be saved by an average arrangement, because their lyrics a) don’t make sense, b) rhyme like poems on the toilet walls of the Holešovice station, c) are often just bizarrely sung lines that would do a better and more dramatic job if they were someone just “just” said. In number one, Patrick Dempsey makes fun of the “bursting into song”, here, by moving into the fairy tale pseudo-realm, he no longer solves anything and everything blends, which of course also hurts the humor, because no one even tries to do it anymore.
Yes, Disenchanted does not try to copy the success of the original, but with the audacity and ambition of its own, it goes into the dark swamps and sinks deeper and deeper with every next step. The duet of the stepmother and the evil queen about who is evil and even eviler is in every way reminiscent of a parody of fairy tales à The Curse of La Llorona as if Disney turned into a caricature of itself, a desperate third-rate romp in which skilled actors unwittingly knock themselves out themselves without seeing into each other’s mouths, as only poisoned darts come out of it, which will traumatize young and old viewers alike.
In the end, of course, the battle is the finale full of digibordel, when the new empire tries to suck out the animated fairy tale where Giselle comes from. Yes, number one had a sexy dragon played by Susan Sarandon, but even there was an exaggeration, while in number two there was only tacky kitsch. And so it is here with everything, which is a punishment for a two-hour footage. Fifteen years is a long time, but when Disney has already spent a lot of money to bring the old team together, one would expect comparable results in such a traditional genre, and not the creative fumbling and tight sloppiness that seemed to mock the progressive original. A brief look at the end credits confirms the worst fears, with a new director and screenwriter, the magic simply disappears and the title Cursed Romance takes on too specific contours. Even the English Disenchanted is apt because this film will definitely “disenchant” you.
If you happen to let it go, immediately apply a patch in the form of a one, which this carelessness has no chance to break. In the original film, Giselle won over not only grumpy New Yorkers but also the entire audience with her infectious optimism and guileless nature. Just one or two songs that fans hum to this day. The sequel exudes only a stupid mood and a banal narrative, from which it follows “You’re having a bad time, but it could be worse, so appreciate it”. Truly a bedtime story and every capitalist exploiter’s dream.
Last year Home Alone, this year, and next year probably a continuation of The Princess Diaries. Disney+ is unusually active in burying classics six feet underground. So that in ten years there will still be someone to bury…
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