Walt Disney Pictures
It’s been five years since Angelina Jolie first brought Disney’s Sleeping Beauty villain Maleficent to life, giving us a slightly different take on the classic fairy tale. The new film picks up with Aurora now the queen of the forest and all the creatures that live there — and some of them are a bit silly looking, even for a fairy tale movie (and I believe I had the same complaint about the first movie) — and some of them seem to know something Aurora does not: Prince Philip (now played by Harris Dickinson as Brenton Thwaites is tied up with Titans) is going to ask for Aurora’s hand in marriage. When she just happens to meet up with him under a tree, Aurora is too preoccupied to understand why the fairies led her to this place, and Philip is too awkward to actually go through with it, but he finally does and the impending marriage sets the story in motion.
Philip’s father King John is thrilled and sees this as an opportunity to unite the human and fairy worlds, while his mother Queen Ingrith has a decidedly darker take on the union — it’s a way to completely obliterate the fairy world. She’s so filled with hatred that she has a woodland creature of her own, whose wings she has clipped, working on a chemical process that will cause all of the fairy land creatures to evaporate once exposed to the substance. But in order to carry out her plan, she must frame Maleficent for putting a curse on her husband (a rather transparent plot device that grows a bit frustrating as not even Aurora believes in her godmother’s innocence), and then sends her army out to kill the Queen of the Fairies while pillaging the forest for the needed flowers for the chemical. Gravely injured, Maleficent discovers she is not the last of the fairies but she is then torn between joining them in a war against the humans or protecting Aurora. And she also learns her true origin that gives her the powers no other fairy has.
Aside from the goofy woodland creatures and the obvious plot device, I rather enjoyed Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (despite some terribly poor projection at the advance screening which rendered a lot of the dark scenes nearly unwatchable). Jolie seems to relish the role and while her prosthetic cheekbones weren’t as distracting this time, her garish red lipstick still leaves a lot to be desired. But as far as her performance, she puts a lot of heart into the character, especially when she discovers more of her own people. Finding the other fairies — or rather being found by the fairies — almost humanizes her which makes things even more difficult when the Queen does launch an all out war on her people.
And speaking of the Queen, Michelle Pfieffer does a great job her of showing us who the true villain of the movie is. The title of the film really should have been ‘Maleficent and the Mistress of Evil’ considering all the terrible things the Queen does to gain absolute power over the land. And it’s here where the film delivers its subtle but powerful message of tolerance. The humans have been taught to fear Maleficent and the others from her world beyond the walls of the kingdom, but in reality those fears are based on half-truths and all out lies, and of course the fairies play right into her hands by going on the attack to prove they are to be feared, when all they want is to just be left alone to live out in the open again like they did before humans became the dominant species. There is a lot one can read into this but the basic takeaway is that we need to not just believe something a person of authority tells us about people who are different from us. Walls and moats and borders just alienate everyone. If we take the time to get to know someone who is different from us, they won’t be as scary as our leaders tell us they are. Food for thought.
As for the rest of the cast, the returning Elle Fanning and Sam Riley are fine as Aurora and Diaval even if they don’t have as much to do as they did in the original. I enjoyed both Chiwetel Ejiofor as the more benevolent fairy Conall and Ed Skrein as Borra, ready to wage war on the humans the first change he gets. And again, it’s not simply a hatred of humans, it’s to regain their rightful place in the world so they don’t have to raise their children in caves deep underground when they should be soaring about the trees. Unfortunately, the three fairies played by Juno Temple, Lesley Manville and Imelda Staunton still look weird and were very difficult to understand with their altered voices, but there is a very shocking and heartfelt moment involving one of the trio that made me gasp.
The film, from what I could see, is handsomely produced with some terrific production design and amazing special effects. I think back to the original Superman movie’s tagline of ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’ and how quaint that now seems compared to what can be accomplished with today’s special effects that give us hundreds of flying fairies. You will believe Angelina Jolie can fly. In the end, I was very entertained by the movie, even under such terrible circumstances as we had to endure, which says a lot. The bad projection could have totally ruined the experience but the story, performances and effects were strong enough to overcome that making Maleficent: Mistress of Evil definitely worth a look, and even a second look.
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil has a run time of 1 hour 58 minutes and is rated PG for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and brief scary images.
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