Desencantada

I could watch Enchanted any time I want to feel better about the basic goodness of people - and that is what is missing in Disenchated. Apart from James Marsden's dimwitted return as the Prince, and finally letting Menzel sing (albeit a forgettable song amidst a sea of forgettable songs), there's nothing to recommend here. It's a sequel that shouldn't have been made, or at least not by a group of writers, which appears to be the case here. Same cast as Enchanted, Amy Adams actually looks even nicer this time around, but what a godawful story they're stuck with - it's just a mish-mosh of set pieces, each trying to set up the next piece, and failing. As was the case with Hocus Pocus 2, Disney has lost its way.

Disenchanted delivers a cliche story that loses the charm of the first film. It manages to siphon out everything that made Enchanted great, whilst adding a forgettable villain into the mix, and numerous plot holes, that had me scratching my head at times. Performances were as good as they could be with the lackluster script, and the climax of the film came off as shallow and underwhelming. This movie is just another Disney reboot and I wouldn't recommend watching it.

Best part of the film was James marsdens character, he's just the only funny person in the whole movie, and it looks like James is having a lot of fun playing him

5/10.

Roughly a decade after the events of the last film, Giselle (Amy Adams) and Phillip (Patrick Dempsey) along with Phillip's daughter Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino) have continued to live as a family including welcoming a new baby, Sophia, into their lives. With their larger family and relative smallness of their apartment, Giselle and Robert decide to move to Monroeville believing the change will be good for them much to the annoyance of Morgan who's now a teenager and dealing with the typical angst with which that entails. Following a fight between Morgan and Giselle, Giselle makes a wish using a wand she received as a present from Edward (James Marsden) and Nancy (Idina Menzel) in Andalasia for her life to be more like a fairy tale which results in Monroeville becoming more magical as a result, but with the price that Giselle is turning into a wicked stepmother.

Disenchanted is of course the long in development sequel to the 2007 hit film Enchanted which is notable for arguably being the breakout film for Amy Adams who received acclaim for her performance as Giselle. Discussions regarding the film were held as far back as 2010 when it was reported Walt Disney Pictures was pursuing active development of a follow-up. What resulted over the years was a recurring trend of information eeking out about the project only for long periods of silence to follow and supposedly this was due to script issues. Varying iterations of the film considered at one point or another before officially being announced in December of 2020. While the movie was developed with plans for a theatrical release, as the film was being finalized in the days of the COVD pandemic both Disney and the producers opted to produce the film for Disney+ as Disney's theatrical efforts were mostly focused on four quadrant tentpoles and legacy franchises. After nearly fifteen years of waiting Disenchanted does capture some of the magic of its predecessor, but it also feels like a reunion piece that's there simply because the cast and crew had fun making the first one.

Disenchanted features the return of most of the major cast and characters from the first film with Amy Adams, Patrick Demspey, James Marsden, and Idina Menzel all reprising their roles quite well feeling slightly more aged, but still very much the same characters we knew in the first film. Gabriella Badlacchino replaces Rachel Covey in the role of Morgan who aged out of the role, and while it's not an especially meaty role as she's mainly just called to be mopey and angsty she does reasonably well in it. Alan Menken also returns to provide the music for the film and while the songs are still good, I think the film maybe gives us a few too many which is endemic to other issues with the film.

Disenchanted runs into an issue with its premise after the setup because once Giselle wishes for her life to be more like a fairy tale, most of the characters stop being themselves and just start acting like fairy tale archetypes with Morgan acting like a standard Cinderella type protagonist and Patrick Dempsey's Robert doing an impression of James Marsden's Edward with the running joke being that while he now "acts" dashing and valiant he's completely out of his depth and this role just isn't suited to Dempsey's talents and only serves to remind you of how much better Marsden was at this schtick and is now relegated to a borderline cameo appearance because the writers can't figure out what to do with him. The reason Enchanted worked was because Giselle's over the top whimsy contrasted with the bustle and cynicism of New York City created a comic culture clash and allowed the fairy tale elements of Edward and Giselle to be funny. With all of Monroville now turned into Monrolasia, we lose that key part of the appeal and Disenchanted loses a massive part of the original film's identity. While some of the costuming and set design remains impressive, you do get a sense of "deja view" feeling you've seen these sets and costumes done before in many of Disney's live-action remakes of their animated properties so yet another part of Enchanted's appeal fails to be captured. The movie also feels more blatant in its referencing of other Disney properties as opposed to Enchanted where it was just generic enough not to be distracting (barring the climax) but when you have them using "Cruella" and "Maleficent" as lyrics in your songs it ceases to feel like affectionate but mocking homage and more like an exercise in brand synergy.

I don't think Disenchanted is bad by any stretch of the imagination and it's perfectly serviceable if you're just looking for easy going viewing or revisiting these characters and performances, but when you compare it to the passion, energy, and novelty we saw in the original film it's a sizable step down. I don't regret seeing it, but I also can't say you should go out of your way to see it so take that for what it's worth.

My main issue with the film is it could've been better, there were some interesting ideas presented rather than just rehashing the original in a dulled down way as most sequels do, the cast were great although writing-wise the character development from the first film had basically vanished and the new characters were somewhat forgettable, still some funny moments but not as memorable as the original, similarly the songs were not as memorable as the original either, lots of abandoned plot threads and characters that had no role in the story but were just kind of there, it feels unfair to compare this to the original since that was over 14 years ago, time flies, but I just think there wasn't really a reason to make a sequel to the first Enchanted

Even so, as far as sequels go it's not the worst, the aforementioned positives stood out for me, the sets were beautiful and costume design was excellent, and I liked some of the ideas the sequel was leading into but the execution just fell flat for me, felt very rushed, sense of scale gone, the animated sequences were almost unnecessary this time as they didn't even involve much movement or expression, and it's a scathing indictment of both Disney's gradual attempts to abandon animation as a medium (despite it being so crucial to their past success) and the conditions animators have to work under, with very little pay or suitable hours, especially compared with the animated sequences of the first film.

All in all it ironically kinda lives up to the Disney tradition of making a memorable, iconic blockbuster film about a princess and then having the direct-to-video sequel being kind of underwhelming, I'd rate this a 6 or a 5 under other circumstances but because I feel like it was close to being a better film and just didn't reach that, and because it doesn't live up to the original, I think 4 is kind of appropriate, Disney needs to pick up their slack, they're becoming too complacent.

So I loved the first movie, it's one of my favourite movies and I think it's one of the best Disney contents ever. This is exactly anything but. I didn't have the highest hopes but this is just disappointing in another level. They really did the original movie injustice and I'm surprised they got all of the actors with this script.

-First of all I'm not sure how they managed to make the CGI actually worse. Even the animated parts look worse. Did they spend all the budget on actors and rushed everything else? Enchanted still holds up but this... Bad.

-Why are they breaking into a song every 5 minutes? They should've paid more attention to script and the character development rather than 10 mediocre songs. It's way better to have 3-4 actually good memorable songs than 10 that are meaningless and uninspired.

-It uses already done many times clichés and relies on previous Disney movies. It was literally Rapunzel and Cinderella with a bit of Snow White mixed in. Why not do something new? Why just rely on existing tropes. Little nuances and cheeky call backs are nice here and there but the whole movie was like that. Try a bit to be a little bit original at least.

-The set design looks very fake, costumes look meh. Hair was good though...

The only positive thing I can say was it was nice seeing the original cast back and they did the best they could with what they were given, especially Amy Adams.

TLDR uninspired, boring, will be forgotten by everyone who watches it after 2 hours.