After knocking it out of the park with her directorial debut in Blockers, I’ll admit to being excited for what Kay Cannon had planned next. But at the same time I was waiting for news of that film’s release, I was also hearing some less-than-glowing reactions to an adaptation of Cinderella that Amazon Studios had put together. Then I suddenly realised that these two films were indeed one and the same and… well, I was still hoping for something good, but that expectation has significantly dampened.
Let’s start with the music, which shows Cannon back on her mash-up kick from Pitch Perfect. It’s a jukebox musical (with a few original songs along the way), and it’s with the very first number that the film’s key problem presents itself: Admittedly decent ideas tethered to terrible ones like a Human Centipede. Covering Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation to set up the musical tone of the narrative (and to establish the anti-establishment views in the dialogue) was a good move, but pairing it with Des'ree's You Gotta Be as Cinderella’s introductory song? Nice bit of self-sabotage there, having her sing something as bland and lifeless as her own character.
Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of Camilla Cabello going into this, and she’s not doing much to change that impression here. Quite a few of the casting choices are pretty decent (Idina Menzel as the evil stepmother, Pierce Brosnan as the king that the queen desperately wishes would stop singing, Billy Porter as the Fabulous Godmother and host to the best scene in the entire film), but everyone is still chained to the dismal material they’re given. That, or they’re like James Acaster and Romesh Ranganathan, who are saddled with James “stop casting me in movies please!” Corden as a trio of animated mice. Not only do they look atrocious in their rendering quality, I could have happily gone through life without having seen Corden’s massive human head on a tiny mouse body, screaming directly into the camera.
But for as much as I could lambast the song choices, the plastic sheen left on them by the music production and the attempts to squeeze them into this pre-established story, or just how useless quite a few characters turn out (Doc Brown as the town crier only exists to waste time, and he’s not particularly entertaining while he’s doing so), the biggest problem here? It is phenomenally dull to sit through. Whatever ideas Kay Cannon had to try and reinterpret the original fairy tale into something with more agency for the female characters (like how the stepmother is recontextualised, or some of the choices concerning Cinderella’s own desires), there aren’t nearly enough of them to warrant this kind of feature-length showcase for them. It feels really stretched out and overlong, to the point where it manages to make the Disney live-action remake from a few years back seem more successful in being progressive than this does.
Beyond being a mess sonically and visually, awash in so many conflicting ideas that whatever good ones shows up are almost incidental, this is genuinely disappointing considering Kay Cannon’s pedigree thus far. Sure, Pitch Perfect 3 was a total dud, but just about everything else she’s worked on shows that she should have been able to deliver something great, or at least good, with this. She knows how to work with pre-existing songs, she knows how to incorporate it into a narrative world, and going by Blockers, she knows how to present stories of women taking charge of their own wants and needs. And yet none of that is present here, making for a quite painful experience where the only possible good that can come out of it is maybe a few jokes at the expense of Acaster, Ranganathan, and Rob Beckett when they show up on Mock The Week.
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