Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Starring: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Emily Beecham, Kirby
Howell-Baptiste, Mark Strong
The key to creating a memorable movie villain is quite simple really.
Cinema is a visual medium, so all you need to do is get the look of your
villain right. When Darth Vader enters the screen in the opening of
Star Wars we instantly know he's a badass. We don’t know
anything about his backstory or how he might have been a good kid who made
a bad life choice somewhere along the way. We just know he looks fucking
awesome. That's enough. Michael Myers' outfit is just a mechanic's baggy
overalls and a spray-painted William Shatner mask, but it's that very
simplicity, that blank canvas, that makes him so damn creepy. We didn't
need two movies explaining that actually, it was Michael's tough childhood
in a White Trash environment that made him a monster. Vader and Myers
arrived on screen like every good villain should, fully formed.
The origin story is probably the least interesting story format, because
it essentially all takes place before an iconic character becomes iconic,
before the good stuff. It's the basket of bread before the Filet Mignon,
and if you gorge on bread you probably won’t enjoy your main course as
much as you would have on an empty stomach. Too often, origin stories
serve to make characters less interesting. Han Solo is a cool moniker,
right? But it's not so cool when we're told it was given to him by some
bureaucrat who needed to fill out a form. Cruella de Vil is a fantastic
name for a baddy, but when we learn that she took her name from a make of
car we just roll our eyes.
We're given that nugget of pointless information in Cruella, Disney's latest attempt to rinse and repeat one of their beloved
properties. This one gives us the origin story of the villainess of
101 Dalmations. Played by Emma Stone (doing her best Helena Bonham Carter
impression), Cruella is reimagined as a Vivienne Westwood-esque fashion
designer in '70s London.
How do you rehabilitate a character we know will ultimately plan on
skinning puppies? Well you give her an antagonist of her own. Enter
Emma Thompson as The Baroness, London's top designer, and the woman
responsible for the death of Cruella's mother (Emily Beecham) as a
child. The Baroness is for all intents and purposes this film's Cruella de
Vil, which makes you wonder why Disney didn't just remake
101 Dalmations again with Thompson in the role. Oh yes, I
remember now, you can't have a woman over the age of 40 headlining a
Hollywood movie, and so we get the sexy young version of Cruella instead.
Sigh.
Struggling to justify this movie, the screenwriters have settled on a
Devil Wears Prada by way of
All About Eve storyline, in which Cruella takes a job as an
underling of The Baroness while plotting her downfall. This plan takes an
age, as the film is dragged out to a soul destroying two hours and 15
minutes. It's hard to imagine any kids having the patience to sit through
a plodding movie made by a bunch of aging British men reminiscing about
the Glam Rock era. Even with all that time allotted, the script has to
resort to exposition dumps to fill in the story. At one point
Mark Strong gives a speech that made me think of that notorious
moment where
Dick Miller
explains the whole plot of Roger Corman's The Terror, all "The Baron this" and The Baron that."
Director Craig Gillespie was most likely hired because he has
previous in telling the story of an iconic villain with his entertaining
Tonya Harding biopic
I, Tonya, but Tonya Harding had an actual story. All Gillespie can do to enliven
this obligatory bout of IP mining is slap a host of foot-tapping '60s,
'70s and '80s tunes on the soundtrack (even though the film is set in
1975) and have his camera sweep and swoosh through a CG recreation of '70s
London. A funky needle drop and an elaborate camera move doesn't make you
Scorsese though; in most cases it makes you Guy Ritchie, and ultimately
it's Ritchie's awful Mockney geezer cinema that Cruella is
most reminiscent of. The money is certainly on the screen, most of it
likely spent on music rights and costume materials, but wouldn't it be
nice if a Hollywood studio gave a filmmaker such resources to make their
own movies instead of constantly trying to fit their artistic square pegs
into capitalism's round holes?
Cruella is in UK cinemas and on
Disney+ Premium Access now.
