Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil (2019) - Movie Review

2019 will likely go down as the year where Disney stretched too far, and I’m not just talking about their ever-growing monopoly on modern Western entertainment. What started out as interesting experiments to redefine their stable of animated classics (or, more likely, extend their copyright holding for said stories) has truly devolved into a collection of repeated and bewildering mistakes. Of the three that made it to cinemas this year, only one of them left me with anything positive to say, and even then, it has paled considerably since I first reviewed it.

In light of all that, I was honestly looking forward to Disney deciding to make a follow-up to what (in my humble opinion) was the single best effort they made within this post-modern retooling bracket: 2014’s Maleficent. I won’t bullshit and say that it’s a perfect movie (the fairy Three Stooges, as performed, animated and written, steadfastly stop me from making any such claim), but as far as redefining a Disney classic, it honestly succeeded the most.

It made Aurora and Maleficent into compelling characters, it added dimensions to the story that made it feel the most worth reviving in this fashion, and it also just plainly outdid the original Sleeping Beauty for sheer entertainment value, which is honestly one of the lesser of the old-guard Disney movies.

And thankfully, this sequel manages to continue the original’s momentum. Starting off on a promising note with Aurora being queen of the Moors and not just relegated to princess status (Disney rarely if ever makes the obvious choice to drop the princess title for name-brand reasons), and showing Maleficent as the protector-of-nature anti-hero, their mother-daughter relationship remains compelling and offers a decent amount of emotional weight. Part of that is down to the writing, but mainly, it’s because Angelina Jolie and Ellie Fanning’s yin-yang chemistry is nicely intact and forms a solid core for the story.

Continuing the ‘man vs. nature’ themes of the original, with the initial prospect of Fanning’s Aurora marrying the prince of another kingdom to end the bubbling tensions between Man and Fay, and it is here where the most unexpected positive of the film presents itself: Michelle Pfeiffer as Queen Ingrith. All things poise and venomously malicious, her role as the antagonist ends up contextualising a lot of the specifics regarding Maleficent’s place as a film directly subverting its source material. And what we get is a quite remarkable villain turn, aided aptly by Pfeiffer’s quiet menace in her delivery, and what could have become a wonky development in lesser hands: Maleficent’s place as the villain among the humans as a result of Fake News.

Maybe not in those exact words, but yeah, this movie tries for political relevancy. I would argue that such a distinctly modern turn really isn’t needed in a fantasy war flick, especially one that looks and sounds this good already, but it manages to pull off the gambit through its depiction of the tensions between Ingrith’s place as the human supremacist, and the new discovery of Maleficent’s fellow Dark-Fay, led by the war-hungry Borra (Ed Skrein in his least slimy role to date). It presents the notion of war of one both supported and decried by members of both sides, each having their reasons for their want for conquest as well as reasons for wanting to avoid conflict. It doesn’t try to outright excuse Ingrith’s actions in the process, lest it devolve into what ‘both sides’ rhetoric looks like nowadays; more that it highlights Borra’s faction on the Fay side as not helping matters.

As the narrative proceedings go from sinister to all-out genocidal (given further grim tones by the notion that a by-product of Fay death is being used to cause even more of it), and the war begins in earnest, what began as rather thinly-veiled hostility gives way to rather enticing imagery and thematic touches. It could just be my own apathy in regards to people who think raw, angry conflict is how the world gets fixed, but I do have a soft spot for stories about wars that see peace as victory, not simply the end of one side or the other.

It may run a little long, the aforementioned Fay Stooges still being around does sap away at some of the enjoyment, and there remains a certain worry that this film’s strengths all rest on Jolie’s shoulders, considering her performance ultimately made both the character and the movie the first time around. But as both a follow-up to what I regard as a pretty underrated feature, as a fantasy flick in its own right, and as a shining light in what has been one of Disney’s most inconsistent years in company history (guess that’ll happen when you release so much material in just twelve months), this is quite enjoyable. Or, in other words, it’s the best live-action Disney retool of the year; take that for what it’s worth.