Oh look, another live action remake of a beloved Disney animated movie. Why do I keep going to see these? I rarely like them all that much. They either slavishly follow the original plot or they try something new but decidedly not fun. The only one I think I really liked was The Jungle Book. At the least, The Little Mermaid didn’t go directly to Disney+, so the studio must have had some faith in it. Oh sure, there were a lot of uproar in certain corners of the Internet over a Black actress cast as Ariel, but I’ll just say this: if Halle Bailey can sing, I don’t much care what she looks like as far as this role goes. And if nothing else, she has a fantastic voice.
Granted, I’m not a huge Disney fan, and my main issue with these remakes if they tend to be bland compared to the more colorful and, dare I say it?, magic originals.
Ariel (Bailey), youngest daughter of the sea king Triton (Javier Bardem), is obsessed with the human world. Not a good thing for a mermaid whose mother was killed by a human. Meanwhile, Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), crown prince and adopted son of Queen Selina (Noma Dumezweni) of an unnamed Caribbean island nation, loves exploring and the sea despite stories of the sea king and his mermaid daughters who want nothing more than to use their voices to bewitch humans and drown them. Triton is concerned his daughter will be hurt or worse by evil humans, but his efforts to have his righthand crab Sebastian (voice of Daveed Diggs) keep Ariel under control come to naught. But when Ariel sees and falls for Eric, she’ll have only one recourse to win his heart: make a deal with Triton’s estranged sister Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) to temporarily gain legs at the cost of her voice.
That means Ariel needs to win Eric’s heart in a limited amount of time. If she fails to do so, well, something bad will happen thanks to her verbal contract. Sebastian can maybe get some help from Ariel’s fish friend Flounder (voice of Jacob Tremblay) and particularly dim seabird Scuttle (voice of Akwafina). There are some other hitches, not the least being Ariel does not remember the terms of her deal and both she and Eric need to deal with disapproving royal single parents. Oh, and Ursula cheats of course. Can Ariel get what she wants to be part of that world?
So, an odd thing happened as I was watching the movie: I was starting to like it. It was never going to be a great movie, but at least for the first half, I was reasonably engaged with what was happening, the songs that came from the original movie were still good, and as much as even the best CGI can do impressive things that still can’t match the hand-drawn originals, there was some nice energy going. Eric and Ariel actually have some things in common and they bond well while the overall significance of Ariel’s voice actually has a bit more weight than it usually does. I don’t quite get why Disney’s remakes seem to feel the need to close holes that no one really minded that much the first time, but here, it isn’t as bad.
That said, the longer the movie went on, the less interested I was. There are some new songs courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda, and most of them sound like they fit in just fine with the original movie’s carry-overs, but there’s one, a song from Scuttle sung mostly by Akwafina that I just did not like at all. I don’t know if it was because the style was different or Akwafina just isn’t much of a singer, but it didn’t work for me. As for the actors, most of them do OK, but the two big name actors are something of an exception. Bardem seems kinda restrained and bored in his scenes while McCarthy, perhaps the most obvious casting for these movies that Disney has ever had, only really seems to show good energy when her dialogue seems to consist mostly of bad fish puns. I haven’t seen the original in a while, so I don’t quite recall how many of those lines were from the original, but either McCarthy seemed subdued or she was showing energy for bad dialogue. Overall, despite somewhat liking it in the beginning, the longer it ran, the less interested I was. It was a bit better than a lot of these live-action remakes I have seen lately, but that isn’t saying much.
Grade: C+
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