Here, Norwegian director Joachim Rønning (one-half of the duo responsible for high-seas adventures “Kon-Tiki” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”) takes the reins, and the results are only marginally more coherent, while remaining every bit as overcrowded in terms of the fairy-tale universe in which it takes place. The earlier “Maleficent” was directed by a visual effects supervisor, Robert Stromberg, who focused on building out the film’s garish rococo world to the detriment of anything resembling elegant storytelling. Of these, Kenneth Branagh’s “Cinderella” is perhaps the most enchanting, while Tim Burton should be kept as far away from these projects as possible. Not all of the spinoffs and remakes disrespect the classics (which were also critiqued in their time for fidelity issues to their literary sources, as the animated “Sleeping Beauty” was in comparison to Charles Perrault’s and the Grimm brothers’ earlier tellings), and some have done wonders to extend the appeal of the Disney spirit to a new generation of audiences. It makes me angry to think what Disney has done with its most beloved “properties” - to use the term that reduces these pieces of shared cultural heritage to exploitable commodities. Why does Ingrid hate magic folk? What does it matter? Her motives are nothing but a pretext to stage extravagant battle scenes - like the ones that clogged the third acts of Disney remakes “Alice in Wonderland” and “Oz the Great and Powerful” - in which audiences are expected to delight at watching flocks of winged fairies dissolve in midair as they come in contact with clouds of iron dust. How far these “Sleeping Beauty” spinoffs have strayed from their roots! And how perverse that the franchise that gave us Disney’s best villain should now be responsible for the studio’s most disappointing villain yet: That would be Queen Ingrith ( Michelle Pfeiffer), Aurora’s soon-to-be mother-in-law, a red-eyed, genocide-ready warmonger bent on destroying fairykind for good. Since when did Disney movies become so belligerent? To the extent that the studio’s classic fare has been blamed for brainwashing young girls into unhealthy gender roles, it’s a positive thing that Disney has toned down the emphasis on helpless female characters waiting to be saved by putatively charming princes, but this obsession with spectacular “Lord of the Rings”-like confrontations between CG fantasy creatures hardly qualifies as an improvement. The new “Maleficent” movie, even more than the last, is preoccupied with palace intrigues, elaborate conspiracies between rival species and an unhealthy obsession with war. Why would a lethal iron allergy even matter, you wonder? In a fit of world-building gone horribly wrong, screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster and Linda Woolverton have taken “Sleeping Beauty” and given it an entirely unwelcome “Game of Thrones”-esque spin. a mistake this “twice upon a time” follow-up exacerbates by giving its previously all-powerful “dark fey” a ridiculous weakness. Semi-comedically playing substitute mother to the bland young beauty, Jolie’s character gets dragged into a series of human interactions for which she is temperamentally unsuited, the equivalent of bringing the Big Bad Wolf to a little pigs convention. Picking up where the first film left off, Aurora ( Elle Fanning) is now set to marry her betrothed (“Beach Rats” stud Harris Dickinson). That’s three-quarters of a billion reasons why the studio would want to dash off a sequel, although I can think of at least one why it should have reconsidered: The “Wicked”-like original went so far in its flip-the-script fairy-tale revisionism that the antagonist had essentially seen the error of her ways by the end - it was her kiss, not Prince Phillip’s, that awakened Aurora - leaving “ Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” almost no way to live up to its title. Landing Angelina Jolie to play the “Sleeping Beauty” baddie in 2014’s live-action redo was a dream-casting coup for which the studio was rewarded with three-quarters of a billion dollars at the global box office. With her horned headpiece, impossible alabaster cheekbones and high-camp attitude, Maleficent looms as by far the most iconic villain Disney ever created.
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