Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Puts a WWII Spin on Sleeping Beauty

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil continues the trend of swings and misses for Disney’s “live action” movies. Dumbo was abysmal, The Lion King was an expensive remake, and only Aladdin tried anything new, and not all of it worked. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil decided to take all of the quality aspects of the original Maleficent and squash them. Maleficent was painted as the reluctant hero of the Sleeping Beauty story in the previous movie by providing her a story arc with growth and depth. This new movie regresses her to follow a similar arc. I loathe this practice and find it offensive to the audience’s intelligence. Disney did the same thing with Finn in Star Wars, cancelling his growth in The Force Awakens by making him try to escape in The Last Jedi so he can have another love story/hero arc. It is lazy writing and it ruins characters, which especially hurts a movie like Maleficent: Mistress of Evil because she is the only real character. Everyone else is a one-note support piece. Angelina Jolie does do an admirable job of glaring and sneering when appropriate, but every other actor seems uncomfortable in their roles. It felt like they were trying a little too hard. Better characters would have been able to distract from the movies structural flaws, but the lackluster CGI was embarrassing at points, especially for a big-budget, star-studded movie. The opening shot was just a CGI tracking shot flying over the lands that made me very thankful that I didn’t waste $3 watching it in 3D. After that overlong flight scene, the story started with generic scene after generic scene. The basis of the story is that Aurora wants to get married and Maleficent is hesitant, but accepting. Then the humans frame Maleficent and Aurora sides with the humans that she just met, while Maleficent is attacked and forced to find refuge with her own kind. During this time, Aurora’s future mother-in-law, played by Michelle Pfieffer, tries to start a literal genocide. And just about everybody is cool with it. Then a big battle happens and Michelle Pfieffer gets comic relief punishment…after attempting genocide. She was the Hitler of this movie, started a war, started genocide, and everyone was cool with letting her live because she was briefly turned into a goat. I understand that it was a family movie, but I thought this plot thread was a bit too much to suspend my disbelief. I found this movie lacking in just about every aspect, but Angelina Jolie kept it from being terrible. Overall, it is just a bad, but not horrible, movie. I give Maleficent: Mistress of Evil 3 out of the 25 times I groaned aloud during this movie.