Maleficent: Mistress of Evil - More half-baked Marvel-esque apocalypse than Disney fairytale
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
Costumes and production design eye-candy are the main accomplishments of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, a sequel to the Disney fantasy, Maleficent (the fourth highest grossing film of 2014) starring Angelina Jolie, as the angry fairy from the Sleeping Beauty tale.
Gussied up in pre-Halloween drag, the film stars Jolie, dressed in fetish-forward outfits, including a ripped black vinyl top, vast feathered wings and goat horns. Opposing her is Michelle Pfeiffer as a sneering human antagonist, wrapped in a gown of shimmering seed pearls.
Is giving Angelina Jolie sharpened cheekbones kind of gilding the lily?
Otherwise, the character of Maleficent, who originally appeared in the 1959 animated film, Sleeping Beauty, has been altered in a way that all but brings fairytale lore into the heavy metal world of the Marvel Comics Universe, with its blend of live-action and animation and the requisite culminating screen-popping battle sequence.
Set five years after the previous film, the new movie sees the porcelain-doll pretty Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) and ward of Maleficent, preparing to marry Prince Philip (Harris Dickinson). Unbeknownst to everyone, Phillip’s mother, Queen Ingrith (Pfeiffer) is planning to use the wedding, where fairy folk and humans will all attend, to strike a fatal blow against the fairies who inhabit the moors adjacent to her vast cathedral-like castle.
When Aurora and Maleficent arrive at Queen Ingrith's castle for a pre-wedding dinner, things go south quickly. Maleficent, who is allergic to iron, can’t use the cutlery. When Queen Ingrith declares she now considers Aurora “my own,” she goes too far. Maleficent unfurls her big wings and flies off, only to be shot down by an iron arrow. She ends up, somehow, in an underground Avatar-like jungle world, led by Conall (Chiwetel Ejiofor in handsome dreads). Soon, Maleficent discovers a whole tribe of goat-horned lookalikes, many of whom are itching for a decisive battle with the obnoxious humans. With the wedding only three days away, conflict breaks out – and occupies too much of the remaining screen time.
The script, led by Disney’s favourite in-house writer, Linda Woolverton (the first Maleficent, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mulan, Alice in Wonderland) hits the familiar notes – a beautiful princess, a handsome prince, meddling old folks, various other anthropomorphized creatures and a trio of chipper fairies who flit about.
But they’re essentially background here for another apocalyptic conflict in the style of Lord of the Rings, with spinning camera moves and all-manner of computer-generated creatures trying to kill each other on land or in the air, accompanied by a frantic orchestral score.
This is not to say the battle hasn’t been somewhat Disneyfied. In the movie, Queen Ingrith’s lab elves have found a way to use iron-rich berries as weapons, causing pink explosions to blossom around the castle in the midst of the aerial battle. This has the no-doubt-deliberate effect of offering a violent version of the famously benign image of Disney’s Magic Kingdom castle surrounded by fireworks.
Pfeiffer gets most of the mean queen face-time in the first half of the film, and a very nice face it is. But there’s little backstory to explain her genocidal agenda, except, perhaps that the King (Robert Lindsay) comes across as kind of a drip, and is oddly oblivious to his wife’s schemes.
Jolie’s character, who emerges to dominate the second half, is certainly more complex, if barely more explicable. The character is derived from the Broadway musical Wicked as much as traditional story-telling, but it also relies on Jolie’s own wounded bad-girl persona.
Maleficent was has one good comic scene when, after receiving the wedding invitation, the title character stands in front of a reflecting pool trying to practice social graces. With her “familiar,” the raven (Sam Riley) acting as coach, she practices smiling without showing too much fang, and awkwardly trying human small talk. But ultimately, the movie is less interested in Maleficent’s psychological conflicts than the way she can arch her eyebrows and flap her large black wings. One peculiar note: Jolie has been outfitted with artificially sharp-ridged cheekbones, which seems like a case of gilding the lily.
Norwegian director Joachim Rønning (who co-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) offers nothing unexpected here, in what amounts to a complicated exercise in paint-by-numbers movie-making.
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. Directed by Joachim Ronning. Written by Linda Woolverton, Noah Harpster, Micah Fitzerman-Blue. Starring: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Harris Dickinson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sam Riley. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil can be seen at the Cineplex Yonge-Dundas, Cineplex Yonge-Eglinton, Cineplex Yorkdale.