If you loved Disney's 1989 animation The Little Mermaid but somehow thought to yourself, "What that kids' classic really needed was to be a whole lot longer, a little more serious, and – I dunno – maybe feature an aquatic bird rapping a Lin-Manuel Miranda tune", well, you are in luck.
The studio's live-action remake of their beloved musical, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago; Mary Poppins Returns) and starring pop singer Halle Bailey as fishtail-out-of-water Ariel, lands with a culturally divisive splash – already regarded with suspicion by nostalgia-ridden millennials and harpooned by the usual racists incapable of accepting an actor of colour as a mythological sea creature who pals around with a singing crustacean.
The discourse is, of course, as dull as it is predictable. There's nothing inherently wrong with remakes, even these commercially driven Disney blockbusters, most of which politely settle into the streaming wasteland as harmless cover versions, ready to point audiences back to the original, or – at their best – offer a new generation their own version of an iconic character.
But to distinguish themselves they need to bring something fresh to the table, even if it's simply weirdness; take Disney's strangely hypnotic 2019 take on The Lion King, for example, which reconstituted the original as a lavish, dissonant digital diorama, like something dreamed up by artificial intelligence. (That's a compliment, and no, I will not be taking questions at this time.)
Sadly, this handsomely mounted, sometimes lively remake of The Little Mermaid is mostly lost at sea, adrift between moments of inspiration and a lethargic facsimile tethered to the demands of major studio commerce. It aspires to a certain grandeur at odds with the material's once-effortless whimsy.
While the essential shape of the story, scenes and (most of) the songs have been retained, what Marshall's film hasn't managed to transpose is the magic of its source material, a musical of such irrepressible energy that you'd probably forgotten that it concerned a 15-year-old who gave up her fantastical life to marry an adult man, with Daddy's eventual endorsement.
As the yearning, headstrong Ariel in the new adaptation, Bailey is a bona fide movie star – but the movie struggles to rise to her performance.
The film's sombre opening, minus the stage-setting musical number Daughters of Triton, forgoes the original's rich sense of teeming underwater life in favour of the empty, enervating feel of a vacuum-sealed sound stage. As ocean ruler King Triton, a sleepy Javier Bardem hews closer to depressed dad than the animated version's buff sea patriarch, whose overbearing, stentorian presence made it obvious why Ariel wanted to escape him – even if it meant doing a devilish deal with sea witch Ursula (embodied here by Melissa McCarthy).
Swapping the clamshell bikini for a technicolour breastplate and rainbow fishtail, Bailey swims into the picture with the charm and acrobatic grace of a computer-generated Esther Williams. The 23-year-old star is a little less excitable than Jodi Benson's chirpy theatre-kid Ariel in the earlier version, but somehow she seems more childlike – a brooding underwater teen whose expression is given to flashes of youthful delight.
She pours this energy into her soaring rendition of the musical show stopper Part of Your World, emerging from murky underwater caves to burst above water like an eel transformed into an albatross. It's a high-water mark that the movie never again reaches, though the exuberant, calypso-flavoured Under the Sea – one of the bulletproof original tunes by composers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – proves impossible to resist, even with its less impressive live-action delivery. (The king's royal consort Sebastian, a Jamaican-accented crab voiced here by Daveed Diggs, remains a reliable comic presence.)
Less successful is Ursula's signature song Poor Unfortunate Souls, though it's the best part of an otherwise lacklustre turn by McCarthy, one that deprives the movie of arguably its greatest asset. Her sea witch is a miscalculation next to the Divine-inspired colossus of the animated film; here, Ursula merely seems angry and bitter, lacking in the delicious, aspirational flamboyance that made her the character you not-so-secretly wanted to be.
Still, in the zero-charisma lottery you've got to feel for poor Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), who's more two-dimensional here than even his notoriously bland animated counterpart. Worse, he now gets his own song to bellow, a Miranda-penned howler called Wild Uncharted Waters that Marshall hilariously stages on a blustery clifftop, like some kind of karaoke video.
The prince's wan dialogue, about wanting to expand his kingdom into new worlds in defiance of his stuffy heritage, is vague enough to both scan as progressive and appease connoisseurs of colonialism – proof that the studio's inclusiveness knows no limits, at least when it comes to appealing to demographic dollars.
Such changes to the animated film are mostly superficial, without any rethink of the fundamental story. For the most part, everything that was giddy and brisk in the original just takes longer to unfold, stranded between a misguided push for live-action realism and fealty to the 1989 movie's superior, cartoon energy.
Most crucially, the new film is considerably less funny than its predecessor.
Any screenwriter that sees fit to do away with King Triton's line "I consider myself a reasonable merman" needs to have a long, hard look into their soul, but the most baffling – and unforgivable – omission in the new film is that of Les Poissons, the completely deranged, Looney Tunes-esque number belted out by a caricature French cook as he endeavours to capture Sebastian for the evening's soup.
In place of this fallen comedic hero we get Lin-Manuel Miranda's The Scuttlebutt, an amusingly silly duet between Diggs and Awkwafina's northern gannet Scuttle, who delivers her rapped lines over a musical number right out of the Hamilton playbook. (We Don't Talk About Bruno it is not.)
All of which is a shame, because Bailey is a genuine star presence, and the darker, live-action setting suggests a movie that – had it abandoned its undernourished nods to the original's comedy, and committed itself to musical drama – could have engaged with historical notions around folklore and race.
A more daring adaptation might even have pushed closer to the tragedy of Hans Christian Andersen's original tale, making the film a companion piece to the animated version – something that, say, adolescent viewers might experience in dialogue with the original. (For that, there's always the haunting 1976 Czech version, whose tone will make you long for the Sofia Coppola adaptation that got away.)
If you're a fan of the animated Little Mermaid, this remake isn't about to replace the original in your affection. But – and I know this might come as a shock – not everything is made for you. For some kids, it may just be their new favourite thing, and a film that opens them up to a world of cinema, music, and fantasy.
The Little Mermaid is in cinemas now.
