Disenchanted Review: A By-The-Numbers Tale That Could Have Been So Much More
Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreenBlog Columnist
Normally I’m not in favor of sequels for the sake of sequels, but with Disenchanted, I thought there was potential. How would Amy Adams’ Giselle adapt to the cold cynical world we have today? How would her family grow and evolve? How would Morgan evolve with someone like Giselle as her step mother?
There were lots of storytelling possibilities, and on its face, Disenchanted took the most interesting one (What if Giselle turned bad), but sadly, it was executed like it was introduced to the script by a re-write a week before shooting begins, with no meat to the bone and no wonder as to the causes and effects of Giselle turning bad.
More on that later. For now, if you haven’t seen this movie yet, know that the trailer pretty much reveals the basic plot structure of the movie. Giselle is not happy with her life in New York City, and persuades her family to give life in Monrovia given its billboard promises of a fairy tale life. Once in Monrovia, Morgan, Robert’s (Patrick Dempsey) stepdaughter, has a typically hard time making new friends and flat out doesn’t like it in Monrovia and wants to move back to New York City. Morgan and Giselle fight, and Giselle makes a wish upon a magic wand gifted to them by the King and Queen of Andalasia (James Marsden and Idina Menzel) to live a fairy tale life.
The conceit of the movie begins, with Monrovia transformed into Monrolasia, and Giselle has her perfect life and great family relations for a short time until she realizes that the wish came with a Faustian bargain: Giselle has to become a wicked stepmother (gradually, of course).
Giselle realizes this, and only has until midnight of that same day to reverse her wish. Hijinx ensues, a couple songs, and plot developments happen at a frantic pace without the space to really explore at any level the world around them and the impacts this type of behavior has.
My main takeaway from this movie is it decided to be a paint by numbers painting even when the canvas was there to say something interesting. This movie was never going to compete for any Oscars, but it still could have had something meaningful to say about earnestness in a world of cynicism like Enchanted, or how frighteningly easy it is to turn a good soul bad in our world, or even how difficult it is to raise a child with innocence.
It passed on those opportunities, even with a 2-hour running time, and that’sfrankly remarkable.
I haven’t mentioned Maya Rudolph yet, or the music. There’s a reason. I was excited for Rudolph’s casting, and she’s…fine in the role. She chews a little bit of scenery, has a little bit of fun, but I was left wanting much more knowing her talents and how good she is in pretty much everything she does. There is a wonderful running gag with her and her chair that elicited a true laugh out loud moment from me that showed the Maya Rudolph I know, but that was part of the disappointment in this movie. There could have been more, so much more, and I believe that to be an objective sentiment, not just me wanting this movie to be something different than what it was.
Patrick Dempsey also doesn’t have much to do in this movie. In Monrolasia, he turns into an adventure seeking hero attempting to slay dragons and ogres. Its mildly chuckle inducing, but also no exploration as to what this means compared to his normal 9-5 job rut. It is Giselle’s story, and that’s fine, but the short scenes involving Dempsey are not fun enough to justify its existence by itself without some type of character building.
The music? Mostly not memorable and unimaginative. The best song is expectedly Idina Menzel’s “Love Power”, and the end credits version might be a touch more fun too. This isn’t a soundtrack that will leave you running to add to any of your playlists.
Ultimately, this is Amy Adams’ movie, and I spent the bulk of the movie wondering what kind of career she could have had. Adams is a wonderfully talented actress, who broke onto the scene with Enchanted in 2007. Her imdb is a bit depressing. It’s not that she chose bad movies, in fact most of her choices are solid from a movie perspective. But the characters she picks simply aren’t as fun as Giselle for the most part. She’s picked a number of roles that are dark and a little bit twisted (The Master, The Woman in the Window, Hillbilly Elegy, just to name a few), and she’s mostly good in them, but she rarely picks roles that shows off the charisma that she has in Enchanted. That’s a shame, because she has it, and she could have been an actress that would be just pure fun to watch (whether she’s a good or bad character).
She recreates Giselle’s charm from 2007 well in Disenchanted, and when she turns bad, it’s fine (I guess), but because the turn happens due to a curse and not a choice, its left a little wanting. Amy Adams has more than enough talent to produce a really provocative performance if Giselle chose bad, even for understandable reasons. In Disenchanted, she didn’t even choose bad. It literally happens to her by surprise, and that’s just plain unfortunate because it leaves the movie with little to say when the credits roll.
Are there reasons to watch the movie? It’s not a waste of time, strictly speaking. The songs and performances are just good enough to maintain attention, especially for fans of Enchanted (like me). Adams and Rudolph fans will get just enough to satisfy them. Pre-teen girls will like the movie, I think, based on my 8-year-old daughter’s reaction to it.
But, if you want to remember a time in Hollywood where even the silliest of movies had something interesting to say and took their time exploring the journey from Point A to Point B in the script, this may be a movie you want to skip and instead look to your memory tree of favorite movies instead.