Review: The Little Mermaid

It's no secret that the Disney version of The Little Mermaid doesn't have a whole lot in common with Hans Christian Andersen's original. It's a shame they didn't take as many liberties when they decided to remake their own version. This live-action do-over is often painfully faithful to the original, and as the original featured singing crabs and an undersea creature jazz band, "live-action" is probably not the best term to describe what's been put on screen.

Mermaid Ariel (Halle Berry) is the youngest daughter of the king of the sea Triton (Javier Bardem, doing his best). He's forbidden his daughters to have anything to do with the surface world after humans killed his wife / their mother. But Ariel sees good in them, especially hot prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) which opens the door for her evil Sea-Witch aunt Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) to do a deal.

She'll give Ariel legs for three days in exchange for her voice - but she'll only give the voice back if Ariel gets a kiss from the prince, and also she magically can't remember this part of the bargain even when told it over and over by crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs) and sea bird Scuttle (Awkwafina). Fortunately the prince seems as into her as she is into him. So the course of true love runs smoothly? Not quite.

The frustrating thing about Disney's live-action remakes of their animated films isn't that they're tinkering with classics - that's been the basis of the movie business for almost a century - but that they're not tinkering enough. There's a timidness that runs throughout them, a feeling that the original was so good that any major changes could only ruin things. Bad news Disney: that ship has sailed. And then sunk, going by the number of shipwrecks featured here.

This version of The Little Mermaid has its strengths, mostly early on with a dramatic sinking ship sequence where the live action really shines. And the casting is never less than decent, with Berry a clear stand-out - a better film would make her a star, and hopefully even this can't slow her rise. She's almost enough to keep this afloat, even when the plot renders her mute for a hefty stretch (singing in her mind turns out to be a useful loophole).

But in taking a script and story (and songs) designed for old-fashioned animation and transferring it to live-action (which here is about 30% CGI "realistic" animation), much of the charm of the original has been lost. A two-hour run time (the original was a snappy 83 minutes) doesn't help, especially when the new elements - notably a quasi-rap track sung by Awkwafina - are often jarringly out of place.

When you're left thinking "well, I guess Sebastian could have looked a lot worse", the bar has been set pretty low - and in some scenes (including a supposedly emotional gathering towards the end which had the audience openly laughing at my screening) it can't even clear that.

There's an argument to be made that classics should be regularly updated for a new generation. Hand drawn animation is out of style, greater diversity in casting is what people now want, and so on. But by often sticking so closely to the original, this version of The Little Mermaid fails to make that case. 

An all-new take on this story might have equaled the original; this one is left floundering.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Plane

 

Briefly the butt of internet snickering for its somewhat blunt title - and yet Air escaped unscathed - Plane is not a film of subtlety. Nor would anyone want it to be: a fancier title would just be wasting everyone's time, and this is an all-action thriller that knows that wasting time is the worst crime this kind of film can commit.

Gerard Butler is Brodie Torrance, the kind of two-fisted pilot who is too good for the shabby airline he's flying for but it's the best he can do after (heroically) punching out an unruly passenger. Unfortunately, that means he's now working for the kind of bosses who think having him fly through a storm to save on fuel costs is a good idea. It is not.

A big part of the fun of Plane - and Plane is a lot of fun - is the way it rapidly cycles through genres fast enough to touch on all the good stuff without ever making it too obvious that we've seen it all before. So of course the storm messes up the flight and we get a condensed version of a disaster movie before Butler manages to safely crash-land (but in a way that leaves the plane intact, which will become important later) on a seemingly deserted island in the Philippines.

Okay, so clearly the next genre up is the "we're trapped on an island and one of the passengers is a killer", because I forgot to mention earlier that one of the few passengers on this New Years Eve flight - yes, Torrance is trying to get home to his family - is a killer (Mike Colter, who already has a spin-off set up) who's been on the run for decades and is being taken back to the US. His guard died in the pre-crash turbulence; can Butler handle a hardened criminal with nothing to lose?

Forget that, because it's time for the next twist. Turns out that the island isn't deserted - well, it has been deserted by any kind of government or law enforcement, because it's the home base for a bunch of terrorists who like holding tourists for ransom then making them star in snuff movies. Can Torrance get the passengers off the island without being detected? Of course not. Time for plan B, where the B stands for "blowing stuff up".

There's a few entertaining diversions along the way - the airline puts together a crisis team and hires mercs for a rescue mission, only when Butler manages to make a call to the airline after the crash the operator thinks it's a prank - but for the most part this is solid meat & potatoes genre fodder with just enough going on to keep things fresh. 

Butler's gruff charm carries this a long way, and French director Francois Richet's non-nonsense approach to this occasionally nonsensical story does the rest. Butler's character is noticeably appalled by killing; he's much more of a "I've got to save these people" than "time to take out the trash" type, which stops this from completely losing touch with reality, at least as far as the on-ground carnage is concerned. 

Once they get in the air, all bets are off.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3

More than most Marvel movies, The Guardians of the Galaxy have been all about the vibe. Well, maybe 20% about the vibe: the rest has been the usual mix of making quips then running around shouting and kicking bad guys in the face while things explode high above a planet's surface. But that's still a lot of vibe for the MCU, where movies like The Eternals made it to cinemas despite a vibe level verging on the negative.

So it's a surprise to discover that this movie not only is actually About Something - it's not like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had any connection to any real world concerns at all, and fair enough - but the real-world issue it's tackling is experiments on animals, which is about as far as you can get from the fun-loving classic rock vibe the Guardians usually specialise in.

The topic comes up in the form of the never before mentioned backstory of Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), who it turns out was the product of a lot of nasty experiments by the colourful yet sinister High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). Now he wants Rocket back, and has sent the super-powered but dim-witted Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), one of his more humanoid creations, to collect what he sees as his property. 

Warlock trashes the Guardian's cyperpunk-esque space skull base, fails to collect his target, and leaves Rocket dying with no way for the Guardians to heal him thanks to a bunch of fail safes built into the tech that's part of his body. Looks like they're going to have to steal the codes to bypass the fail safes, and that heist is only the beginning (mostly because the movie goes for two and a half hours).

Rocket's plight is no barrel of laughs, and having Peter Quinn, AKA Star Lord (Chris Pratt) a heartbroken drunken mess thanks to the death, then revival from an earlier point in time when she didn't love him, of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) also cuts down on the quips - for a while at least. 

So this is the grim and gritty Guardians pretty much nobody was asking for? Hardly, but the tonal whiplash is sometimes pretty severe as the story goes from Rocket and his tortured animal chums dreaming of freedom (good luck there) to the more traditional sitcom-style banter between Drax the Destroyer (David Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel, getting to enunciate a bit more this time) and Gamora's perpetually angry sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).

Throw in the usual big action scenes, a bunch of cameos, a few too many characters (if Warlock feels shoehorned in, the return of his mother is definitely surplus to requirements) a lot of needle drops (Beastie Boys fans get the extra thrill of finding out which lines Disney won't allow from 'No Sleep Till Brooklyn'), and an adorable subplot where Cosmo the space dog spends the entire film worrying that Kraglin (Sean Gunn) has called her a bad dog, and you have an overstuffed, often frantic film that's all over the place (and space).

Which is not unusual for the Guardians of the Galaxy. Writer / director James Gunn was briefly fired from Marvel in 2018 (dodgy tweets, obviously), leading to an odd MCU speedbump where Thor joined the Guardians, didn't fit in, and then almost immediately left and never looked back. There was also the recent Guardians Christmas Special for Disney+, which explains a few Kevin Bacon references in the end credits but is otherwise best left unmentioned.

This third and seemingly final installment is the kind of film with too much going on for everyone to like all the moving parts equally, but the high notes are high enough that the flat patches don't linger. It's not afraid to go directly for the tear ducts in all manner of ways; one death is a tragedy, the destruction of an entire inhabited planet is just something that happens as part of a day's work, and experimenting on animals is really, really bad.

Lately the more comedic Marvel movies seem to have embraced a kind of sloppiness in their storytelling as a way to amp up the energy. It doesn't always work (try to keep track of where people are standing in almost any big villain confrontation), but at least here there's a sense that Gunn is throwing in everything on his way out the door. You'll never doubt this one's coming from the heart - 20% of the time at least.

- Anthony Morris