"But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more." The line springs from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," and it also graces the opening moments of Disney's latest feature-length spin on that immortal fairy tale. Arriving amid mighty cascading walls of water and a few notes from Alan Menken's justly beloved, mildly refurbished score, the quote is a classy if disingenuous flourish. Much like the studio's 1989 hand-drawn touchstone, this ostensibly live-action but heavily digitized redo takes a famously tragic story and spins it into a drama of reckless teenage empowerment, populated by colorful under-the-sea critters and set to a rousing calypso beat. It has, in short, almost nothing to do with Hans Christian Andersen, and even less to do with suffering.
Unless, that is, you're easily tormented by the sights and sounds of a peerless animated classic being padded, mimicked and CGI-fortified into a half-diverting, half-dispiriting retread of itself. Still, insofar as the animated "Little Mermaid" is easily the best movie to emerge from Disney's late 20th century renaissance (bite me, "Beauty and the Beast" stans), this do-over is not entirely devoid of charm or amusement, including the unintentional kind. A mermaid may have no tears, but I did shed a few laughing whenever a breastplated, fish-tailed Javier Bardem showed up, solemnly peering out from behind a fake-looking curtain of hair and doing his best helicopter-dad grimace.
Bardem plays King Triton, though with his sternness of mien and delivery, he can't help but channel one of his most famous roles: Call it "No Country for Old Mermen," with a magical trident in lieu of a cattle gun. Triton is a wise ocean ruler, though he gets along less than swimmingly with Ariel (Halle Bailey), the most adventurous and impetuous of his teenage daughters. To her father's chagrin, Ariel is obsessed with the human world, all the more so because access to that world is strictly forbidden to her and other merfolk. "I wanna be where the people are," she sings in her secret grotto, where she keeps a small museum's worth of human artifacts salvaged from nearby shipwrecks.
