Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

So, a little while ago, whilst talking about Gemini Man, I discussed the concept of the inflection point, that moment during a movie (or, really, any other piece of media) when you realize you just can no longer give a full damn. Something like that, anyway. In Gemini Man, that point came fairly early on in the film, a relative rarity. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil just couldn’t leave well enough alone and felt it necessary to break even that mark. Sonofabitch.

So, opening scene: We’re invited along on a nighttime raid of the moors, during which some poachers are looking to snag some fairies (faeries?). Things go sideways. Now, I’m already beginning to check out a bit, noticing that Disney’s back at their overuse of digital VFX and are more than happy to keep on covering a bunch of it up with poor lighting. Joy. But this isn’t enough to kicky my brain out just yet. We’re next led into the light of day on an effects-drowned tour of the moors, during which we’re re-introduced to the visual abominations that are the three fairies (faeries?), the ones that served as Aurora’s caretakers in the animated Sleeping Beauty back in the day but took a backseat role to the title powerhouse in the original Maleficent. They’re just as terrifying as before, but the dynamic camera movement makes them even more painful to the eye. In fact, the only thing keeping them from popping out of the screen due to horrific appearances is the cavalcade of similarly hideous creatures making appearances around them. I guess we learned absolutely nothing from Strange Magic, and we’re apparently stuck with the wrong end of the uncanny valley going forward. More joy. But wait, it gets worse, and we’re coming to the actual inflection point. As they’re fluttering about, the fairies (faeries?) banter back and forth, and the following exchange is made:

“She’s not ‘sleeping beauty’ anymore.”

“I see what you did there.”

Yup, so do I. You got written by absolute hacks. This is where things went completely off the rails for me, and I’m not sure that five whole minutes had passed. (It’s possible, though.) And it wasn’t like these lines were said in an otherwise vacuum: The absolutely, completely, no-doubt-about-it, trust-me-it’s necessary voice-over that preceded those lines informed us that all of the progress that took place in the previous film – y’know, where Aurora and Phillip are clearly set on a love-path toward each other, one that seemingly guarantees peace and happiness in the land, and Maleficent seems fine with it all – has been tossed aside, I favor of Maleficent harboring some jealous and over-protective grudge against the prince that prevents her from consenting to their marriage. Awesome, totally awesome. We can’t figure out anything new and creative to do with our characters, and we absolutely must make a sequel to a successful film, so let’s just do a soft reset. Makes it easy! Oh, and shortly after the aforementioned lines, while we’re having a sitcom-style meal between two opposing families (gotta meet the soon-to-be in-laws, right?), or maybe just before that (it’s hard to remember now, my attention was already stabbed fatally in the chest), we get the gem “This is no fairy tale”. The inflection point has already been reached, my escape velocity just ramped its speed with a hefty dose of nitrous.

Suffice it to say, the script is downright atrocious, one of the worst I’ve encountered this year, and that’s saying something. This is hack-level at its best moments, of which there may be only two or three, if I’m being generous. The fact that we’ve essentially moved beyond the story of the first film is bad enough, but to take the story into the laughably bad places it does makes this screenplay truly a thing of nefarious origin and purpose. None of the cast – including Angelina Jolie and Michelle Pfeiffer – is able to survive the onslaught of garbage writing, and most of them come off much the worse for having to read what the cursed pages tell them to say. And all of this is beside the point that the first film didn’t really need a sequel to progress its story, its story having, y’know, been satisfactorily concluded.

Then there’s the issue of the visual effects. The first Maleficent had its fair share of problems, but I mostly felt the effects work wasn’t one of them (the three fairies (faeries?) excepted). Here, they just went too far. There’s far too much in the way of VFX, and every drop of the tidal wave looks terrible. Every item either looks overly fake or ugly in a way not intended by the animators. I now understand the decision to hide a lot of it under the cover of darkness, especially considering how the daylight shots look, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. This is a new level of bad effects work, and it’s almost entirely due to the overuse thereof, the loading of the screen with as much nonsense as possible. Of course, if there weren’t so much of it, we wouldn’t be quite as distracted from noticing how bland and unimaginative the architecture and the rest of the production design is. They’re right, this is no fairy tale: it’s a crap Hallmark Channel miniseries, complete with shit writing, garbage acting, and surprisingly bad-looking production values. All the joy.

Need I even say that this a bad movie? Well, I just did regardless. Don’t bother with this incredibly unnecessary and poor-produced nonsense. Let it appear and disappear like the similarly pointless dreck Disney’s tried to make out of nothing, like that awful Nutcracker movie. It’s for the best that these things just die out without witnesses, believe me: it’s more humane that way.