Movie Reaction: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Formula: Maleficent ^ How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

At this point, it's like Disney is looking for new ways to anger its critics. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (btw, I'm calling it Maleficent 2 starting now) is uniquely designed to piss off the people who complain about the lack of resources going to original ideas. It's a $100 million movie. It's CGI heavy. It's based on a remake of and old property. And, it's a sequel. Give it a male lead, and it would earn "Outrage Bingo". I suppose it isn't unique, exactly, given that Alice Through the Looking Glass is the same thing, but with one star of The Tourist swapped out for the other. That's not a movie that anyone wants to be compared to though. I'm pleased to at least say that Maleficent 2 does at least win that match up.

Maleficent 2 picks up a little while after Maleficent. I'll admit that I don't remember much from the first movie, but that's OK, because Maleficent 2 immediately resets everything anyway. Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) gets engaged to Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson). They have dreams of peacefully uniting the humans with the magical creatures of the Moors. Phillip's mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) isn't as excited by the peace talk and manages to use Maleficent's (Angelina Jolie) bad reputation to incite a war between the humans and the creatures of the Moors. Maleficent also comes across more fairies like herself in the process. It's all just a big excuse to get to a big final battle.

It's a poorly conceived story. Most of it hinges on Maleficent not telling Aurora "I didn't do it" early on, and it's never clear why she doesn't. The movie really does just want to reset all the character dynamics to those of the first movie. It's also not clear why Maleficent only finds out about the other fairies now. They live pretty close and are already aware of her. It's easy to be cynical about the movie. It only exists because Maleficent did so unexpectedly well five years ago. There's no need to a sequel to exist.

That said, I liked it. Michelle Pfeiffer channels herself from Stardust and Charlize Theron from Snow White and the Huntsman and really seems to relish this villain role. Jolie's crazy cheekbones are still mesmerizing. The big CGI battle is wild and crazy. Jenn Murray plays this wholly unexplained henchman of Pfeiffer's with campy intensity*. Maleficent 2 is the same kind of fun that The Nutcracker and the Four Realms was but without the need for a bunch of exposition to set itself up. It really worked for me, partly because I never believed that it was trying to be seriously good.

*She reminded me a lot of the model/gymnast/assassin in The Spy Who Dumped Me.

Look, it's not even 2 hours long and it still ran long. Jolie feels oddly sidelined throughout the movie. Elle Fanning's Aurora has the least discernible personality of any protagonist I can recall in the last few years. The plot is silly at its best and dumb at its worst. But I still liked it.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend