Describe This Movie In One Peacemaker Quote:
ADEBAYO: If we have a kid, I'd like to name her Octopussy. And if it's a boy, Sharknado.Brief Plot Synopsis: Boy meets mermaid, boy loses mermaid, mermaid gets legs, boy gets legged mermaid.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 Comic Book Guys out of 5.
Tagline: "Be a part of her world."
Better Tagline: "But, but, but ... you're black."
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Young mermaid Ariel (Halle Bailey) just wants to be where the people are. Specifically, one person: Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), who Ariel rescues from a shipwreck. Her dad, King Triton (Javier Bardem), is none too pleased to hear it, and forbids her from further "above world" activities. Devastated, Ariel is duped by Triton's sister Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) into giving up her voice for a chance at spending the rest of her life with a dude she's never actually met.
"Critical" Analysis: If it's a year with a number in it, then it must be time for Disney to do a live-action remake of one of their animated movies. Already the authority in leveraging public domain properties for profit, Big Mouse has long championed double-dipping on those same titles to wring out a few (hundred million) dollars more from audiences increasingly desperate for children-friendly flicks in theaters.
That The Little Mermaid is better than many of these previous efforts (looking specifically at you, Mulan and Aladdin) feels less like a focused strategy and more like ... inevitability. At least some of these have to be decent, right?
Disney's mostly in-person do over of the 1989 movie that put their animation department back on the map opens with a Hans Christian Andersen quote: “But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.” It serves as a nice bookend for the film's ending, but it's debatable how many people will remember its significance.
Or that the original fairy tale ends with the Little Mermaid basically sentenced to indentured servitude for 300 years.
Some changes are more unnecessary than others. Chief among these are the new songs — because you gotta pad this out, apparently — courtesy of original movie composer Alan Menken and new lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda. Eric's ("Wild Unchartered Waters") is ... okay, if painfully earnest. Ariel's ("For the First Time") works well enough thanks to Bailey.
But "The Scuttlebutt," featuring the rap talents of Scuttle the northern gannet (Awkwafina) and Sebastian the crab (Daveed Diggs), is Not Good. We lost "Le Poisson" for this?
The lyrics on two existing songs have also been altered. The updates to "Kiss the Girl" rein in Sebastian's more stalkery advice, while an entire verse of "Poor Unfortunate Souls" (the one that tells Ariel to "hold her tongue" in order to get a man) is cut. Supposedly this was to avoid making girls feel like they shouldn't talk out of turn, in spite of the fact it's Ursula (the movie's villain) giving the advice.
Fortunately, Bailey is quite winning as Ariel, and Hauer-King's Eric is pretty progressive for whatever year this is supposed to be. And in the spirit of the best MCU villains, King Triton has a point. The story's been updated to show the damage done by man (inadvertently, this is pre-Industrial Revolution, after all) to the ocean. On the other side, Eric wants to reach out to other cultures to improve his own eventual kingdom's well-being. Is that a malaria reference in a Disney movie? You bet your ass.
Having said that, maybe Triton's "majordomo" should be more imposing and competent than a crab. This seems to be a recurring problem with Disney royalty (see also Zazu).
As pointless cash grabs go, Disney could do (and has done) a lot worse than The Little Mermaid. The two main human characters work reasonably well. McCarthy is a bit too restrained, and Bardem is a fine actor but clearly not comfortable working in front of a green screen. It earns a mild recommend thanks to Bailey and updating the message without being preachy.
The Little Mermaid is in theaters today.
