Cruella (2021)
“I’m just getting started, darling.” – Cruella de Vil.
Cruella (2021)
Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Written by: Dana Fox (screenplay), Tony McNamara (screenplay), Aline Brosh McKenna (story)
Starring: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser
I’m very conflicted here. On the one hand, it’s great that Disney took a risk with a unique prequel story instead of playing it safe and regurgitating the Glenn Close 101 Dalmatians movie. On the other hand…this screenplay was so disjointed that it felt like all the actors were trying to make a completely different movie.
Emma Stone was playing a more sarcastic version of the cartoon Cruella, Emma Thompson was doing a Devil Wears Prada impression, the two henchmen were trying to be in a slapstick comedy, and Mark Strong was trying to be Alfred from Batman. All the performances were great, but the tone was ALL over the place. Switching between a bit too nice and a bit too evil, both Cruella and the movie was left feeling…bland…sanitised. This wasn’t helped by a convoluted back-story for Cruella’s transformation into the devilish psychopath we know.
But by far the biggest failure in this movie was the dogs. If you’re making a live-action adaptation of a movie with five dogs as main characters, you cannot make them CGI. The CGI was admittedly quite good, but you could tell the dogs were fake…and that ruins the entire illusion of the scene.
The costuming and set design was quite cool, and you have to commend the actors for committing to their roles in a way that brings the fictional world to life. But the confusing character development and tone shifts meant that I still don’t know what that world is…apart from maybe one with no real dogs.
Rating: 6/10