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Amazon’s ‘Cinderella’ is extra manipulative than magical: Evaluate
Like so many issues in 2021, Prime Video’s Cinderella is a bippity boppity bummer.
With pop star Camila Cabello because the titular princess and the writer-producer behind the Pitch Good trilogy on the helm, you’d assume Kay Cannon’s adaptation of this traditional fairytale could be magical — an incandescent mix of glittery costumes and up to date jams enchanting sufficient to move you away from our cursed actuality.
However like a glass slipper that received’t fairly make it over your heel, this Cinderella by no means will get comfy sufficient to take you wherever. From the start, it as an alternative comes off as cloyingly calculated, with a gap quantity that captures a lot of what doesn’t work about its strategy.
“As soon as upon a time…” fairy god individual Billie Porter begins, earlier than launching right into a smarmy monologue all about how villagers on this “old style” kingdom are caught in a rut. However simply because the prescience of that exact premise settles in (A society the place the whole lot form of sucks, has for years, and nothing is altering? Tag your self!) a mash-up of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” and Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be” arrives as anachronistic as — and no extra refined than — a bulldozer.
Let Idina be imply!! Credit score: amazon studios
With breakdancing laborers of unspecified professions spinning shovels within the city sq., it’s simple to see what the film was going for: A feel-good begin to a feel-good film that, should you simply give it the subsequent 1 hour and 53 minutes of your time, will make you’re feeling good. Nonetheless, it’s a bizarre alternative. Because the city lights up with intricate choreography and strong-lunged refrain members belting ‘90s R&B, the sense that the whole lot is simply effective and dandy on this image e-book world clashes with the fact simply described to us.
The dearth of stakes continues as we’re launched to Ella’s homelife, the place her not-so-wicked stepmother Vivian, performed by Idina Menzel, presents as vicious as a declawed home cat. On this telling, Vivian is extra involved with Ella being married off alongside her daughters Malvolia and Narissa, performed by Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer, than together with her ungrateful stepchild cleansing the cinder. So as an alternative of letting Menzel on the cruel cruelty tapped by Cate Blanchett in Disney’s 2015 model, she’s diminished to a half-baked character with little objective exterior of protecting Madonna’s “Materials Lady” within the second act.
Additionally, the mice look very bizarre. Proper? Credit score: Amazon studios
Ostensibly, defanging the depraved step household permits this story’s major battle — that girls are banned from conducting enterprise within the kingdom, and Cinderella desires to open a costume store — shine brighter. However as numerous critics on social media have already identified, that #GirlBoss premise collapses beneath the burden of its remarkably ill-advised reasoning quick, and sacrificing essentially the most enjoyable performing alternative on this story wasn’t value it.
It’s these miscalculations that make Cinderella really feel disingenuous. There are enjoyable moments, positive — specifically, Pierce Brosnan badly serenading his queen Minnie Driver; Nicholas Galitzine’s Prince Charming having an earring; and a bunch of shenanigans with speaking mice, performed by James Corden, Romesh Ranganathan, and James Acaster. Plus, Cabello brings a tenacious dedication to her position you don’t have any alternative however to admire, and Porter is, as at all times, a flawless creature of which we’re not worthy.
Billie Porter delivers, so not less than there’s that. Credit score: amazon studios
However for each different second you have to be seeing stars in your eyes, marveling on the surprise of this fantastical fairytale world, Cinderella presents you with daring selections that can make you ask “Why did they do this?” lengthy earlier than you even care about “How?”
Inoffensively effective however by no means good, this Cinderella is yet one more tackle a traditional with nothing new to say. Positive, you’ll be reminded that girls ought to have the fitting to personal property. But when that passes for a successful fairytale in 2021, we’re in actual bother.