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