BEFORE: I'm going to take a two-day detour over to Disney Plus, the chain kind of demands it. I really should be spending more time over there, because I only got through Season 1 of "What If..?" and then didn't even start the "Ms. Marvel" and "Echo" shows, which I said I was going to do, but there just hasn't been time. I got enough shifts at the theater this month, and that's kept me occupied, to the point where a co-worker texted me and asked me if I would cover his shift this week, and I turned it down - usually I'd just say "Yes" right away and then start counting how many more hours will be in my check, but really, my dance card is plenty full. Still, I'll be taking a week off in May and I could use those hours...nope, not going to do it, I'm behind on too many other things at home.
James Marsden carries over from "Unfinished Business", and with "Sex Drive" in February, yep, that's three this year for him.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Enchanted" (Movie #443)
THE PLOT: Fifteen years after her "happily ever after", Giselle questions her happiness, inadvertently turning the lives of those in the real world and Andalasia upside down in the process.
AFTER: Fifteen years is a long time between sequels, though it may not be a record - it might, though be a personal record for me, the longest time between watching a film and its sequel - I think this beat out "Avatar: The Weight of Water" in that sense. It's enough time for Robert's daughter Morgan to now be in high school (and also get played by a different actress), but I have to call a NITPICK POINT on this, because if Morgan was about nine years old in the first movie, she should be 24 now and out of college, not still attending high school. The math doesn't add up for her here. Ah, I guess maybe 15 years have gone by in the real world, but only ten have passed in the movie world. So she's 19? By 19 I was a sophomore in college, just saying.
Giselle (former resident of the fairy-tale world of Andalasia) and Robert are moving out of Manhattan as people tend to do, to the suburban land of Monroeville, only to find that their very large house needs further renovations, Robert can't quite get the hang of commuting to the city (which is weird, because, millions do it every day...) and Morgan has trouble fitting in at her new high school. OK, well, pack up the stuff and move back to the city, then, because suburbia really doesn't get any better, I can assure you. Why would anyone leave the land of 24-hour delis and subway trains that run all night? OK, it's expensive to live in Manhattan, but now it's expensive to live anywhere. All right, based on the square footage of that house, I think I see the appeal. The kitchen is gigantic, and they're only in it for a few minutes every morning!
Also, the backyard comes with a portal back to Andalasia, and soon they're visited by the King and Queen, Edward and Nancy (Nancy used to be Robert's girlfriend, but somehow their visit isn't awkward at all. Not until they reveal that they brought a magic wand as a gift, but there's a whole scroll that comes with it to explain the magic and how to use it (Pay attention, this could all be important later.) and they also say it can ONLY be used by true children of Andalasia (sounds like another codicil that could be important...).
Giselle goes a little too far in trying to help her daughter acclimate - but come on, she MEANS well - and this puts her in conflict with Malvina Monroe, who doesn't officially run the town, but she runs the school PTA, the local HOA and probably has a seat on the town council as well, so she might as well be the Evil Queen. This encounter (or something else, I have my own theory) brings out another side of Giselle, when the town clock strikes, her eyes turn yellow and she says some back-handed compliments in a not-nice way, also she takes her daughter out shopping for a dress for the town festival/ball, and buys more clothes for herself. A little bit later, she's forbidding her daughter to go to the ball and locking her up in the tower, she's showing signs of turning into (wait for it) a wicked stepmother instead of just a regular one.
I think this process started before Giselle used the magic wand, but now, honestly, I'm not sure. To try and fix everything, Giselle uses the wand to turn the town into a "fairy-tale life" for them, but I guess she left out the word "perfect" and forgot somehow that fairy tales have a darker side, and not all of them end well for everybody. The whole town is transformed into "Monrolasia", Malvina becomes the Evil Queen, the three gardeners become the three fairies from "Sleeping Beauty", and then there are musical numbers throughout the town that look like ones from "Beauty and the Beast" or what have you.
It's a bit "WandaVision", perhaps, with an upstate NY town that seems to be living out its own reality, though we're not sure if there's a bubble over the town or if the wishing spell somehow affected the whole planet. It doesn't really matter, all that matters is that the chipmunk turns into a cat sidekick, and Giselle and Malvina compete to see who's going to be the villain (because there can only be one) and Malvina tries to get the magic wand, but she doesn't realize that it won't work for humans or transformed humans, only true sons or daughters of the fairy-tale realm.
That realm, by the way, is suddenly in danger of disappearing, because its magic is being siphoned off to keep this NY town from reverting back to normal, or something, and the scroll tells us that by midnight the spell will be irreversible, more or less, so time is of the essence. Robert's no help because he's suddenly engaged in a battle against a family of giants that has come to town, so Morgan goes through the well to the land of 2-D animation to enlist help from Edward and Nancy. The scroll, meanwhile, is not really any help at all, but I guess maybe that's because they consulted him too late? It's hard to say.
I don't know, maybe fifteen years is too long to wait for a sequel - or maybe it's a bit odd that a film that talks so much about magic doesn't seem to have very much of its own, and what is magical here feels kind of forced. Like, just because you can turn a chipmunk into a cat using CGI animation, that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. Having two characters sing about which one can be more evil feels similarly misguided, I want to like these characters, but now how can I. Maybe spending 10 years developing a movie isn't helpful either, because any great ideas that people had at the start of the process maybe got worked over and rethought and then ultimately removed in favor of other things that were proposed by committee, or maybe this is just how a movie feels when it doesn't live up to the original source material, I don't know.
I know all the references to other Disney movies were cute at first, who doesn't like keeping an eye out for Easter eggs like dancing brooms and poisoned apples, but then they did a similar thing in "Pinocchio" where all the clocks in Geppetto's shops had characters like Bambi or Donald Duck on them, and then it all starts to feel like shameless cross-promotion. Disney Studios used to make more original stories (well, ok they stole from Brothers Grimm and others, but you know what I mean) and now all they do is jam as many cameos as possible into every film, because no amount of advertising is ever enough. (See also: "Ralph Breaks the Internet")
Also starring Amy Adams (last seen in "Dear Evan Hansen"), Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Scream 3"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "Maggie's Plan"), Gabriella Baldacchino, Idina Menzel (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Yvette Nicole Brown (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Jayma Mays (last seen in 'Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Kolton Stewart (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Oscar Nuñez (last seen in "The Lost City"), Brooke Josephson, Rachel Duff, Mila Jackson, Lara Jackson, Elmear Morrissey, James Monroe Iglehart (last seen in "Three Christs"), Michael McCorry Rose, Ann Harada (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Rachel Covey (last seen in "Enchanted"), Stephanie Karam, Fiona Browne, Camille Lucy Ross (last seen in "Arrival"), Matt Servitto (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Anthony R. Mottola,
with the voices of Griffin Newman (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Alan Tudyk (last heard in "Strange World"), Adam Shankman (last seen in "A Walk to Remember")
RATING: 5 out of 10 singing NYC pigeons and rats
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