Cinderella (2021)

I tried, I really did! I hoped that the fairly decent, experienced, ensemble cast coupled with state of the art visual effects and a collection of modern-day pop lyrics would breathe new life into this timeless story. Well, sadly, that was all just a triumph for optimism over, well, just about anything... It's terrible. Good looking, well produced, but terrible. Am I the only person left alive who is fed up being shouted at by Edina Menzel? Pierce Brosnan demonstrated in "Mamma Mia" (2008) that he is happy to play parts with his tongue in his cheek, but here I fear he must have cringed when he saw; likewise Minnie Driver and a whole host of British comedians led by the ubiquitously un-talented James Corden. Billy Porter tries a different take on the fairy godmother character but features all to sparingly to make much impact on an otherwise extremely pedestrian interpretation that reached it's nadir with the cute but totally wooden pairing of Nicholas Galitzine (Freddie Mercury would spin in his grave) and Camila Cabello. Sorry, maybe if I were 6 years old and had nothing to compare this with, I'd not be so harsh - but I'm not and this is poor, really poor...

Cinderella is a jukebox musical, based on a classic fairy tale, with CGI animals, and the now obligatory ethnically diverse cast (though oddly relegated to the extras; all of the main characters, with one exception that we'll get to later — and that's certainly not Camila Cabello —, are of the Caucasian persuasion. It's like, how much more lazy could this writing be? And the answer is none. None more lazy. To put it in perspective, Lin-Manuel Miranda's so-called songs from Hamilton or In the Heights are all over the place, but at least he sat down and committed them to paper himself (and you can tell from the result that he did without any help at all). Conversely, what we have here is the worst of two worlds: on the one hand, covers so watered down they constitute sonic homeopathy, and on the other, original songs so bland that they make the covers sound good in comparison. As bad as, say, Rocketman is, at least it's a jukebox musical that makes sense; after all, one expects to hear Elton John songs in an Elton John biopic. This of course doesn't change the fact that, should I want to listen to John's version of “Pinball Wizard”, I'm going to watch Tommy, not Rocketman. By the same token, if I want to see a Cinderella musical, the gold standard is still the 1950 Disney version, which contains original, plot-relevant songs that they were written expressly for the film — as opposed to a glorified playlist that fails miserably at the two most important functions a song has in a musical: moving the story forward and developing the characters (how exactly a medley of “Whatta Man” and “Seven Nation Army” is going to accomplish either of those things, I haven’t the foggiest) — especially considering that YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, etc. allow me to easily enjoy the superior, genuine article performed by the artists who wrote and/or recorded it in the first place. As for the exception to the 'inclusive' cast that I mentioned above, it's the Fabulous Godmother; played with overflowing exuberance by Billy Porter; this is the only character endowed with a life of its own, something for which the actor, and not the script or the director, deserves exclusive credit. The rest — even (sigh) Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver — are so opaque and forgettable that they might as well have been as computer generated as the animals