The Dark Herald Recommends: Disenchanted
I hadn’t planned to watch this, but it was on at the in-laws after Thanksgiving dinner.
I’ll give the movie this much. It knew what it wanted to be. It just wasn’t a realistic goal.
The original Enchanted was Disney sending itself up and it was kind of endearing. A Disney Princess comes to the real world and brings a little magic with her. The Central Park musical number was really good and did everything it was supposed to. At the end, Giselle gets the high-power New York lawyer Robert and his six-year-old daughter.
Sweet.
The sequel starts out by showing discontent with life in NYC. Giselle and Robert move to the New York suburb of Monroeville.
The family has all kinds of adjustment problems the new house is falling apart, the teenage girl, Morgan hates not being in New York, Robert hates commuting to the City for four hours on the train every day, Giselle doesn’t get along with the local school board queen. They have a newborn daughter who keeps them awake all night. Giselle makes a magic wish that everything be like it would have been in the happily ever after world of back home in a cartoon. Problem, she’s a stepmother. Naturally, she starts to turn wicked.
It was good or at least okay, but it had some fundamental problems. I am quite certain that its biggest was a script that was originally written in 2011.
When Enchanted first came out it was 2007, YouTube was only two years old, the closest thing most people had to a smartphone was a Blackberry, Baby Bush was still president and everybody knew that Hillary had the nomination sewn up. It was a different world. If this sequel had come out five years later, it would have been better as it was fifteen years was just too long of a wait for a sequel.
The story feels like events that should have been taking place five years later not, fifteen.
Morgan was supposed to be six or so in the original, fifteen years later she would be getting ready to graduate college, not having new-girl-at-high-school issues. In 2007 Amy Adams was 33 but had the kind of features that could make her look eight years younger. But today she’s 48 and she just can’t carry a role of a woman who is in her mid-thirties. She’s a trouper, but she can’t do it.
Giselle has made some adjustments but is still too fairytale-airheaded for a woman who has lived in New York City for fifteen years. Again, it would work if only five years had passed, the same goes for the move to the suburbs. Patrick Dempsy has gone from 42 to 57 and it shows.
It had its pluses; the musical numbers were fine. The sight gags worked and the ending had a nice Gen-X touch. Instead of moving back to New York, Robert opened a local practice, Giselle learned to fit in with her community and so did Morgan because she had found a boyfriend. Of course, he’s black, it’s 2022.
Look it isn’t too hard to get past the inconsistencies in a film that at its core isn’t meant to be serious. It’s serviceable entertainment and if it happens to be playing at the in-laws during the holidays, you’ll be reasonably entertained by it, provided you don’t expect too much from it. Disenchanted isn’t Woke and it’s certainly head and shoulders above Hocus Pocus 2.
The Dark Herald Recommends with (limited) Confidence.
