Disney's The Little Mermaid (Live-Action)

[Daniel]

Streaming September 6.

[Ben]

Just in time for my birthday. Yay?

[Ben]

Yeah, so…this was…pretty bad actually.

Not as bizarre as Pinocchio, but not as "good" as B&TB either. It’s just a bit of a mess. If you thought The Scuttlebutt was Disney's worst song *ever* then sit yourself down for this one, since the whole film seems to be on some kind of hyperkinetic drive, with non-stop editing that's just shot-shot-shot-shot-shot without giving anything time to breathe and multiple choice and tonal inconsistencies that keep undoing anything it randomly and very occasionally comes close to getting almost right.

Front and centre of the nonsensical problems is the casting. It's all over the place, like the movie. Okay, so they went with a black mermaid. Fine. But where is this set? Why are there many people of multiple different ethnicities? It’s clearly set long ago, so how are they all getting along without any of those old times' issues? What’s the slavery angle? The black land queen doesn’t "want to be left behind", so how does she think that’s going to be achieved? The sea king, Triton (a sleep-walking Javier Bardem), lords over his…people? What people? Where the heck are all the other merfolk?

Okay, we see his "family", but only just. He has seven daughters, again all of which are different ethnicities. Okay, fine. They’re supposed to represent the seven seas. Fine. But it’s later clear that they all had the same mother…!? So why do they all look different? And, more importantly if they all grew up together, why do they all have their own dialect accents? It’s one of many never-answered or satisfactorily explained choices that’s here because, y'know, that's it.

And then we have poor old Artie Malik — probably still best remembered by mainstream audiences for trying to blow up Arnie as a terrorist way back in True Lies — as the queen's…consort? Secret love? What?? Grimsby was never like this! Again, it’s all about the color of this imaginary West Indies/Caribbean/European mix that isn’t all one thing or the other.

Top of the tree is naturally Ariel herself. Bailey isn’t bad, but she isn’t good. We’ve spoken about how she tries to "emote" Part Of Your World rather than feel and act it — a couple of times I burst out giggling at random attempts to find the frustration in her situation — and I have to admit that she carried the non-speaking parts quite well if still a little inexperienced, but…

I don’t ever like to criticise the way people look. There’s nothing, within reason, that can be done about the way some people look. That’s how they, and we all, are. It’s not fair to zero in on those things. But blown up to projection proportions, I have to address the spot above her eye, and just how distracting it looks on a big screen. The lighting never helps, with some shots almost looking 3D in how prominent it looks. Honestly, I was quite mesmerised, which only played up how also far apart her eyes are, leading to an somewhat ethereal quality, sure, maybe, but also to an appearance that had my wife questioning if she was actually real or was completely CG. And she was serious! Again, if all the merfolk had this almost extra-terrestrial quality to them it would all fall into place, but they don’t, fins aside, even if Bardem often looks awkward and strangely bloated when he "sits" in his throne, thanks to questionable angles and framing.

This is down to Rob Marshall's non-stop directing. He sure directs the heck out of this one. In fact, he’s so busy directing so much that he doesn’t really ever give the story and performances a chance. And then, every now and then, he remembers that this is supposed to be a musical and tosses in one of the old songs, or at least most of them, and a couple of bad new ones.

Of these the best is Uncharted Waters, which still isn’t great. A decent hook is left drowning in a sea of a melody-less lyric without anywhere to go, with a performance by a Patrick Dempsey wannabe Prince Eric that’s all over the place, running and jumping and flailing his arms around to try and sell that burning, inner desperation that just makes him look like a madman. Which is what probably comes from having a mixed identity that isn’t adequately explained and questions whether he’s actually a prince at all…exactly!?

Anyway, while he’s out there doing all that, the all-too-real looking Sebastian who still never comes off as looking all too real, pointlessly, is trying to sell Ariel on the good life under the sea. Gee, he knows a song all about that! Oh, it already started. Just another dropped cue that this film has a knack of doing, as if it’s embarrassed to actually be a musical. Just because it’s an immortally good song, they can’t really rip up Under The Sea, but they do try to totally miss its point. Instead of Ariel sneaking off towards the end as in the original, here she's actively involved and, because she’s got that R'n'B thing down, joins in, joyously, as the song goes on. Yep, she's sold on the idea of staying. For sure. Sebastian has triumphed. Ariel isn’t tempted anymore. Job done. Until the song ends and she’s gone.

Meanwhile, Ursula is moping about in her own cave, lamenting that her now-brother (again, I assume, from different parents? Nothing is ever clear) Triton got the big job (how, why?) over herself. Again, wouldn’t that TV special casting have been better with Queen Latifah reprising the part here? Would have made more sense in a family dynamic way. Anyhoo, I'm no fan of Melissa McCarthy, but she admittedly reigns it in here to do a basic impersonation of Pat Caroll, minus the wit, charm or threat. And why they tried to cover her natural eyebrows with makeup and then giver her patently drawn on ones only a few millimetres higher is again beyond me, but it shows in almost every shot.

Poor Unfortunate Souls lacks in the film just as it did as a clip, with McCarthy screaming the lyric out in order to try and be the menace she should be, but again, because she’s just not that good or nuanced, it just comes off as shouty and desperate instead of a great actress actually having fun with it and gleefully chewing up the greenery. I trust Gal Gadot in the already awful Snow White isn’t going to be much of an embarrassing improvement.

When Ursula changes to…whoever, never given a name…the film finally becomes a little more interesting, though again for first timers it might not be clear who she is and why. Suddenly Eric's world is full of people, again from all over, who all seem to be pleased to be there, like Song Of The South, and that we met earlier in another tuneless new song where Ariel has lost her voice and yet can still sing. Okay, so that one was inner-monologging, but only for the most part. Alan Menken's soul must crush a little more every time he’s asked to do one of these, and the pointless "dedication" to Howard Ashman in the end credits feels glib and tokenised; I suspect he would be rolling in his grave.

And we haven’t even got to the aforementioned Scuttlebutt yet. Hoo, boy. The curse of Lin-Manuel Miranda strikes again! It doesn’t matter how many words we can squeeze into an overly-wheezy Awkwafina's mouth, just make it loud, obnoxious and hyper enough for none of that to matter or for any of the actual pretty important plot point to get across, especially as it’s supposed to explain who the mysterious girl is that just turned up and bizarrely seems to have turned Eric's head, this time without a whiff of magic. He just seems to take it as read, and doesn’t question how this girl isn’t black, like the one he saw before. I guess he really must have been knocked out, eh?

At least she has better hair than Ariel's. Nothing wrong with braids, and I actually liked how they "solved" giving her the red-tinged coloring, but it always looks so dry and unkempt. Shouldn’t Ariel have fantastic looking hair, of whatever style? As the film goes on and other elements come to light, one can’t help but keep noticing how frazzled it looks. Either way, the story plays out as before, although this time, of course, Eric isn’t allowed to save the day, so it’s Ariel that plunges a ship into a huge Ursula, now brought about not by just increasing McCarthy in size but by going the whole terrible looking CG route. Again, why? It takes away from the impact of the ending by having distractingly awful CG. Even a giant Sark at the end of Tron felt more authentic than this!

So poor Eric does nothing but hang on a sinking ship, though Ariel does big him up to Dad and say he helped out, just because, y’know, he did last time. And then it all ends, amazingly an hour longer than the animated original which just goes to exemplify how economical Disney's animated storytelling used to be. Finally we see some more merfolk, who all seem to have seen Luca and all blend in well with the landlubbers on the shore without question. All is right in this world, wherever this world is supposed to be. Here Menken's music swells up but again sounds like a cover band doing the hits.

Actually, and again bizarrely, despite having an orchestra ostensibly twice the size he had to play with in 1989, the music throughout this Mermaid feels *smaller*, perhaps due to the orchestration (well, no, absolutely down to the orchestration) and less connected to what’s happening on screen. It’s all just part of another element that never really shines like everything should.

This goes back to the voices, too, with already mentioned Awkwafina doing Awkwafina as Scuttle, just because, and Flounder and Sebastian just doing Flounder and Sebastian lock-stock from the cartoon, just because, but again without the charm, timing or personality of those originals. Like the whole rest of the film, it all comes off as some kind of fan recreation, which I suppose a lot of these redos are.

I’ve yet to look back on our screening last night and come up with one really, really, good bit that I could really get excited about. Hmmm… Nope, not really anything, no. I wanted to like the new music, or at least the new orchestrations of the old. I wanted to try and plug into the fact that this seems a drama with some songs, as opposed to a musical with some drama, but it’s all so heavy handed and not much fun in again trying to feel "real". I wanted to try and like how they changed things around, but all of it — Fathoms Below being the obvious one — just comes off half-hearted and held back just for the sake of being "different", not better, or even just as good as before.

With Peter Pan And Wendy being the most tedious of these things, and Pinocchio being the most mind-melting, The Little Mermaid (or My Little Mermaid as I’m sure someone wanted to keep calling it) generally sits down at the bottom of the sea along with those attempts, if not quite so bad as either of them, just below or on par with B&TB. That’s not to say that this isn’t slightly laborious too, without a spark that ever becomes close to magic, and it never needed to be anything over two hours in length at the maximum. But for all the widescreen indulgences, it’s just all surface and no depth.

[Bill1978]

The big question that I want Rob Marshall to answer is why he chose to end the film the way he did? Like surely it would have been better to see Eric and Ariel being pushed towards a larger boat than just offscreen and then fade to black on an empty ocean. It was such an odd choice.

[Dacey]

Eric is still under Ursula’s spell. I wanna say you saw his eyes change? Although it was subtler. When I went in theaters, as with Turtles, the screen was DARK, which didn’t help as this is already an overly dark film visually. But anyway, I wanna say it’s pretty well-established he’s still under her magic, although I would have to watch it again (and also, I may just be saying that because it is established in the original, so the expectation was there).

Ariel singing along to Under the Sea makes no sense, but thus movie REALLY wants to push Ariel’s voice on you. And in the RPX theater, it hurt my ears as it always came in overly loud. But I think some of it is also direction? On American Idol, she sang Part of Your World and made it sound much more intimate than it does in the finished film, so she is capable of doing that.

I’ll do what Ben didn’t and say something nice: the Jodi Benson cameo was lovely. And I didn’t think it was bad so much as aggressively “okay” for want of a better term. But it lacks the show stopping musical numbers of Beauty (which I still really do love), the fun and energy of Aladdin, or the jaw-dropping visual effects of The Lion King. It’s just sort of dull, and really would have benefited by Chef Louie appearing to liven things up. But that would have taken away from another Ariel song, I guess. To quote the Family Guy Godfather joke, this film really “insists upon itself,” a line that of course makes no sense, but in this context, sort of does.

(And the ending was so needlessly long and drawn out. Just end on the wedding boat instead of the vague “they’re off to explore the world” angle. But I am very glad they never attempted to reference slavery, which would have “offended” the very people who claimed they wanted it in the movie)

[Ben]

Ah, yeah, the Benson cameo. Did actually mean to mention that: yes, it was close to being nice. I even pointed out who she was to Jen.

But then Ariel picks up the dinglehopper, tries to use it to the embarrassment of everyone around her and, just as Jodie goes to help her, she throws it down on the table in disgust and storms off.

So even this moment, which *could* have been a sweet "passing of the dinglehopper", turned out to feel like a Felix Unger to the old Ariel, thus robbing it of its sweetness, and being yet another puzzling moment in a film full of puzzling choices.