Maleficent Review
Kind of OK.
The day will come when I finally learn to not get excited by good trailers but that day is not today. (I also like to tell myself that the day will come where I win the lottery, get Congress to pass my mandatory death penalty for Mimes and Clowns law, complete my unstoppable world conquering army of mutant atomic super men, and get a girl to go on more dates than I have fingers on one hand but that day is also not today.) I have been seeing Maleficent trailers for months and each time I get more and more excited. Angelina Jolie as an evil fairy with horns and wings? A clever re-imaging of a classic fairy tail? A battle between what we in the Warhammer world we would call the Wood Elf Forest Spirits and the Bretonians? Amazing special effects and CGI? How can this be anything less than amazing?
Then I see the movie. I’m not going to disparage it. It’s not bad. It’s just not great. It’s more or less just…there. It really tends towards the standard design-by-committee take no chances pap that every other main stream movie is, counting on visuals and star appeal to make up for the lack of creativity and quality writing. Angelina Jolie is pretty amazing and more or less carries the whole movie on her sexy shoulders but her character is so watered down that everything she does leaks impact from every seam. The CGI is as amazing as a $200,000,000 budget will get you (in case you were wondering, $200,000,000 is enough to send 307,692 children to school in Africa. I’m just saying) and there is not a hint of bad acting. It’s just clear that this film was paralyzed into mediocrity by a fear of doing anything outside of the formula.
In truth I am pretty disappointed by Hollywood’s inability to do the whole fairy tale redo thing and have it do more than just suck. I really want to see some cool stories come from the classic Brothers Grim but instead we are fed dross such as Hansel & Gretel, Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, and Mirror Mirror. 
They didn’t all totally suck (well, Hansel & Gretel did, and Jack the Giant Slayer will put you to sleep in the veterinary sense. Image courtesy of the Movie T Shirt category) but every time they come out all I see is more wasted potential. It’s like the goal is to come out with the blandest porridge possible, fulfilling all the minimum nutritional requirements but not much more. Pretty much the gruel they ate in the Matrix. I’d put this movie at the top of that list of films but not by more than a nose.
