Disenchanted is something I’ve been waiting for for quite some time. 2007’s Enchanted is quite possibly my favorite Disney “princess” movie. Between Patrick Dempsey’s stiff, rule-following Robert and Amy Adams’ optimistic, romantic, but unknowing Giselle, it’s a great love story all wrapped up in less than two hours. Oh, if only it had stayed that way.
With more songs than the original, the film definitely leans more musical fantasy, instead of a fantasy romance with some well-placed musical numbers. I love Adams with all my heart as Giselle, and I’m glad she came back. However, without spoiling anything, Dempsey is extremely underutilized, both as an actor and in his character Robert. This is a story focused on a family building a new life together. Robert is point-blank the butt of the joke, especially in the magical world of Monroeville.
While we all need jokes, there are far too many characters the film utilizes as such. The queen of underutilization is Malvina (Maya Rudolph), both played up as the villain of the story, and that’s it. There’s piecemeal development thrown her way and it just goes to showcase some of the problems had in development, between several script rewrites, and reshoots.
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Nancy (Idina Menzel) and Edward (James Marsden) do make appearances in the film, but they’re here and there. It’s a sprinkling when it could have been a better idea to tag the couples up again and see how they do against a challenge. One of the things that may benefit the IP of Enchanted is to go to an animated show with Menzel and Marsden potentially returning to voice the characters? I think that could be fun.
Ultimately, the main problem Disenchanted has is in its script. The plot suffers from trying to tie in some of the threads of other classic fairy tales. It feels like the film could go down any one of the tales and feel less superfluous. But instead, the trails lead five steps down the fairy tale, before getting back on the main path and trying a new one. Not to mention, the musical numbers derail the plot as well and are nowhere near as well done as they were in Enchanted. It’s an attempt at nostalgia capitalization, and it fails miserably.
Overall, Disenchanted has some highs within the cast, but it’s definitely got a lot of lows. The magic wasn’t present enough to get this movie the juice it needed to be a worthy sequel. The return of the main four actors, while nice, just doesn’t give enough reason for me to love it. Enchanted entangled people of all ages by presenting a new connection to the bedtime stories in our world. This one just reminds us that the real world is waiting for us to wake up. – Katie Rentschler
Rating: 4.5/10
Disenchanted is streaming on Disney+ now.
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