With news that Amazon is about to purchase MGM, and Discovery having just merged with WarnerMedia, we’re truly living in the era of the media mega-corps. Author David Mitchell’s predictive outcome that all movies will one day become “Disneys” may just prove true. It’s a digression from the central point of this review, but it’s the sort of thing that kept running through my mind as I was watching the House of Mouse’s ongoing attempt to revitalize their in-house catalogue of one-time hits.
The overwhelming tidal wave of mediocrity in larger budgeted entertainment is nothing new, but it’s rarely ever felt as focus tested as it does now. Inoffensive and flavorless, with eyes on the international box office tally, has increasingly become the order of the day. Even with those restrictions, Disney still has been able to manage some mostly fun, if forgettable, entertainment in the form of their Marvel and Star Wars outings. Not so with these live action revamps, though – the true thorn in their side. From the failings of Aladdin, the ghastly Lion King, and the wuxia cosplay of Mulan, the studio just cannot crack the code in recapturing the magic that made the animated originals so endearing. Add Cruella, the newest revamp of their rogues gallery to the list of failures.
Cruella, directed by Craig Gillespie, a filmmaker whose career got off to a somewhat promising start with the quirky Lars and the Real Girl, and was quickly enlisted to become a go-to Disney hack, is another effort in the mold of the Maleficent franchise. This idea of rehabilitating their colorful villains is something they seem to be really stuck on over there, and while they both are more or less taking their cues from Wicked, Cruella has an exceptionally harder hill to climb. It is, after all, trying to get you to root for a character that has been classically pitched as a dog-killer. Hardly the hero franchise-fare. The solution? Do everything you can to NOT tell that story. Create an entirely new protagonist with the barest association with the title character, half white hair aside. Early spoiler: she actually loves dogs.
The retelling is centered on Estella (Emma Stone), who as a young girl, watched her poor mother get murdered by Dalmatians (seriously) at a fancy costume party hosted by the fashionista The Baroness (Emma Thompson). Orphaned and a runaway, Estella falls in with a pair of pickpockets named Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), and she develops a knack for designing their costumes for various pick-pocketing schemes. This all changes after she gets her first big break cleaning the toilets at a fancy department store run by that same Baroness. Eventually, after a big (drunken) artistic breakthrough, the woman who has left such an indelible mark on her life – artistically and otherwise, decides to take her under her wing. That’s when Estella begins to learn some of the darker secrets of her own past and how it will shape the “persona” she will become.
At its core, Cruella is really just the chewed-up leftovers of other popular fare. Reading the above synopsis, you can already tell that the film is headed deep into The Devil Wears Prada territory. It even goes so far as listing Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna among its credited scribes here, grafting a xeroxed version of that story onto a family-friendly take on Joker, all wrapped up in glam rock costuming and needle drops. Beyond the recycled nature of almost every moment of Cruella‘s exceedingly bloated running time, it’s hard to not roll your eyes at its attempt to sell you on the idea that this is a “punk/rebel” take on the character. Yeah, because there’s nothing more punk than market tested four quadrant cinema.
But all of that would be fine, well not fine, but tolerable, if the film had much going for it beyond both of the leading Emmas having a really good time and some very nice costuming (there’s no doubt that Jenny Beavan will score this film’s lone Oscar nomination and likely win). The script is largely idiotic, earning little of its twists and turns and growing worse as its running time ticks along, with Mark Strong particularly getting the shit-end of that stick. Cruella is one of those movies that, were it 80 minutes, its sins could largely be seen as forgivable, but somehow it manages to be nearly an hour longer than that and it feels every moment of that running time. Some of that is the copious use of slo-mo to the needle drops that extra “edge”, some of that are the action setpieces that largely exist without much spacial awareness at all, but mostly its a screenplay that’s tying itself in knots to create a brand new character that’s more Harley Quinn than Cruella De Vil.
Somehow this thing is so interminable, it feels longer than Zack Snyder’s Justice League. To add insult to injury, there’s a scene where Stone’s character rocks out with her The Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” That’s the kind of ropey storytelling we’re working with here, and yet 75% of the time, the dogs that do appear in the movie are CGI.
There are just so many better ways to spend two hours of your life.