A disappointing musical that I’d probably wait to watch for free down the road…if you watch it at all. Time is a cost after all…
What Works: Emily Blunt and James Corden are great as the baker and his wife. I also liked Johnny Depp’s five minutes of screen time since he looks like he’s having the most fun of anyone on screen. For just those two all-too-brief scenes, the enthusiasm is infectious.
What Doesn’t: The first 90 percent of this film is just a mash-up of four separate fairy tales we’ve seen a thousand times tied together by a “new” stock character of a witch and a childless couple on a quest. Then the final ten percent comes along and destroys what we saw in the beginning by taking detours that feel arbitrary. I’ve never seen the stage version of this movie, but as cinema, the “tweaking” to the fairy tale stories feels cheap and unearned. Also, so much of the movie is what we’ve seen before, it feels “too little, too late” to be original in the home stretch, especially when characters we’ve grown to care about begin going through unnecessarily hard times.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Trying to make a fairy tale Disney movie dark is all the rage these days (Maleficent, the upcoming Cinderella) but it feels more than a little desperate.