Be Careful What You Wish For (In A Sequel)

Disenchanted is a little bit less than Enchanted in just about every way imaginable.

It’s less charming, less memorable and less fun. Its songs are not as catchy and its story is less unique. Even the animated sequences feel like a big step backward, which is jarring. Its jokes land less often and its cast—while doing their best with the script—feels less alive.

Overall, the production feels less polished—more like a movie made for a streaming service than one made for a theatrical release which, I suppose, is exactly what it is. And that’s a shame. Disenchanted ends up feeling like the kind of movie that’s been stuck in development hell for a decade-and-a-half: Messy, half-baked despite such a long gestation period, and lackluster compared to the original.

Enchanted is the best Disney movie of the 21st century in my opinion. It released fifteen years ago and nothing the House Of Mouse has put out since has rivaled its wit and charm and musical numbers. I can instantly hum or sing along with ‘Happy Little Working Song’ or ‘That’s How You Know’. Composer Alan Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz wrote the music for Disenchanted also, but most of the sequel’s songs are unmemorable, and the choreography is never even close to as clever.

Of the new film’s songs, only ‘Badder’ really hits (it’s basically this film’s ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’). The song-off between Giselle (Amy Adams) and Monroeville matriarch Malvina (Maya Rudolph) is a lot of fun and packs more energy than the rest of the film’s musical numbers combined.

And while it’s nice to see Idina Menzel get a song this time around—her song ‘Love Power’ is decent but forgettable; I liked it more than anything in Frozen 2, which doesn’t say much—like so many of the songs in the movie, I can’t recall the tune. Jack Dempsey even gets in on the singing and dancing in the sequel, which is fun.

But mostly it felt like the cast was wasted on a predictable, ultimately unsatisfying script that did very little to build off the original’s charming subversions. Easter Eggs to previous Disney movies, like the three fairies from Sleeping Beauty, don’t really count. (I did enjoy Pip’s transformation into a cat, which gave us one of the best line’s in the film: “I’m starting to feel superior to every other living being”).

You can watch my video review below:

This was a film that could have really landed with a tighter screenplay and more focus. It hit home for me personally simply because my daughter is now a teenager and has dealt with many of the same issues Morgan (played this time by Gabriella Baldacchino) faces. My daughter saw Enchanted for the first time as a young girl (it came out the year she was born) and watching the sequel as a moody teenager was—well, bittersweet, I suppose. Funny at times, sad at times.

The central conflict between Giselle and Morgan—the universal struggle shared not just by step-mothers and step-daughters, but by mothers and daughters as well—ultimately falls a little flat thanks to the weirdly rushed pacing in the 2-hour film.

The basic premise is this: Giselle is unhappy with the life they’re leading in NYC after having a new baby with Robert. She doesn’t know how to deal with Morgan now that she’s a teenager, so she decides—and Robert agrees, foolishly—to move everyone to the suburban town of Monroeville. Here, things get worse largely because it’s not the fairy tale life she was hoping for and Morgan is, understandably, angry that she was forced to move in the middle of high school, and move to some small town where she doesn’t know anyone.

When Prince Edward (James Marsden) and Nancy appear from Andalasia and give baby Sophia a magical wishing wand, Giselle uses it to wish for a fairy tale life. Things go predictably wrong—it’s all very WandaVision but without the mystery or cleverness—and there’s a race against time to turn things back before the spell turns permanent and Andalasia is sapped of all its magic and destroyed. Giselle starts to become the Wicked Stepmother of her own story (cursed by the wish for some reason). One of the highlights of the film is Adams’s turns between sweet Giselle and wicked good Wicked Stepmother. It’s very Smeagol vs Gollum at times.

In any case, at one point Wicked Stepmother Giselle says something along the lines of ‘Everybody knows a fairy tale can only have one villain’ and that’s a good point that the film’s creators—director Adam Shankman and screenwriter Brigitte Hales—should have taken into account. Maya Rudolph’s character is almost superfluous to the plot and like so much of the film, the conflict feels tacked on. Meanwhile, Dempsey is used almost entirely for laughs this time around, but the running joke wears thin pretty fast. We miss the dynamic between Robert and Giselle from the first film rather badly by the end of this one.

I’ll have a separate post up about the ending (so as not to spoil anything here) but I think they whiffed it pretty badly as well. All told, while I definitely enjoyed some of the spectacle and there were some fun moments throughout, and even a few emotional scenes that I think hit closer to home simply because of relatable they were to my own life, the much muchness that made the first film so great was missing.

Disenchanted is rarely funny in the genuinely clever way the original was, and it lacks the focus, wit and charm of its predecessor. There’s probably a really good story about about motherhood and family buried inside the film, but it’s too scattered to get to the point or explore the notion of what ‘happily ever after’ truly means in the modern world, in a particularly compelling way.

Perhaps it never could have lived up to the original. Then again, maybe it would have been better to give this the love and care and attention—not to mention, budget—that a follow-up to the Oscar-nominated modern classic Enchanted truly deserves. And give it a theatrical release.

I enjoyed watching Disenchanted with my kids, but we all enjoyed it a lot less than the original.

Disenchanted is out today on Disney+.