But I do miss the cartoon version of Under the Sea, with all the fish on their musical instruments. Bailey’s singing voice really elevates Part of Your World to a whole new level. They pale in comparison to Under the Sea and Part of Your World, both of which are wonderfully adapted here. Daveed Diggs is great as the grumpy crab majordomo.īut the new song for Prince Eric is forgettable, as is Ariel’s new number. There are a handful of new songs and the only one I liked is the Scuttle rap, performed by Awkwafina with a bit of Sebastian harmonizing. Indeed, the entire cast is marvelous and the remakes of the old songs are a lot of fun. She and Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric have splendid chemistry, which certainly helps. She is wonderful throughout, perfectly capturing everything we loved about the original Ariel, but adding a little bit more depth and adventurousness to the character. Much of that is due to the powerful performance-and singing chops-of lead Halle Bailey as Ariel. The critics must be crazy, because this is an absolutely delightful picture and is quite possibly my favorite of all the princess live-action remakes. I’ve been burnt out on the whole project for quite some time and thought this would be another soulless cash grab from the House of Mouse. I was deeply skeptical about this latest Disney remake. Well, speaking of hats it’s time I ate mine. Later, Scuttle steals the hat in order to get the pair to follow the bird down to the lagoon so that they could serenade the would-be-lovers with a slightly altered version of Kiss The Girl. There’s a fun scene in the new Little Mermaid live-action movie where Ariel snags a hat for Prince Eric, plopping it on his head playfully after snatching it off the head of the street vendor. The Little Mermaid Credit: Disney The Little Mermaid Review: A Delightful Surprise Make of that what you will.įinally, I should point out that what Rotten Tomatoes shows on its front page is ‘Verified Audience’ scores, but you can click on ‘All Audience’ and suddenly it’s a very different picture: Peter Pan & Wendy, the most recent live-action Disney remake, scored just a bit lower than The Little Mermaid with critics (62%) but bombed completely with audiences at just 11%.Įven just casually observing forums and social media, you see a pretty wide range of reactions from wild praise to “meh, it was okay” to “this was hot garbage.” There is no way that Rotten Tomatoes’ 95% or Metacritic’s 2.1 are accurate reflections of what people are actually saying about this movie in the real world. I know that Rotten Tomatoes is taking moderation of user reviews seriously, and tries to prevent review-bombing, but these scores seem inflated beyond what is realistically likely for a film that is getting such a lukewarm reception from critics. Beauty and the Beast’s live-action remake also got an ‘A’ CinemaScore, but only clocked in at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. CinemaScore has actual audience members giving this an ‘A’ grade, so it’s definitely being warmly received. Are we to believe that moviegoers love the remake even more than the original? That certainly wasn’t the case with Beauty and the Beast, which fared better with critics and audiences as a cartoon by a wide margin.ĭo I think Metacritic’s 2.1 is an accurate reflection of this film’s quality? Definitely not. Indeed, the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is now scoring much higher with audiences than the 1989 animated classic, which sits at 88% with audiences and 92% with critics. I would expect this movie to have a pretty wide spread of negative and positive reviews, and a score within shouting distance of the critic score (a bit higher or a bit lower, but not almost 30 points higher!) Critics, while not entirely politically aligned, are much more likely as a group to be sympathetic to social justice politics and less reactionary to changes made to beloved classics than the average moviegoer. I find it utterly preposterous that this film would score that much higher with audiences than with critics.
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