The Little Mermaid (2023)

Starring: Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Noma Dumezweni, Art Malik, Daveed Diggs (voice), Jacob Tremblay (voice), Awkwafina (voice), Jessica Alexander
Directed by: Rob Marshall
Rating: PG
Genre: Adventure, Family, Fantasy
2023

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: Ariel (Halle Bailey) dreams of joining the human world and takes an enormous risk when Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) offers her a dangerous opportunity.

Review:

Tim: I've been complaining about Disney's live action remakes for a long time at this stage. And, trust me, I get it from a business perspective. It makes sense. You have IP that everyone knows and loves. You get to recycle those same stories and characters and make a bunch of money in the process. It mostly feels like a sure bet, so the studio executives will never stop until audiences stay away. I get it. I do wish Disney cared more about artistic integrity, but I'd just be kidding myself. The other big plus for Disney is that despite the quality of these movies, people will come. Like nearly all their live action remakes, The Little Mermaid does nearly everything worse than the original. It's a good movie- yes. The story and characters and songs are all well established. This is a good film, when the original was one of the all-time great animated films. Once again, there's a huge drop in quality here.

Perhaps the one area this movie improves upon the original is in terms of diversity. It was cool to see a much more diverse cast. I know racists and morons were all up in arms about the casting, but their opinions matter not at all. I really liked that Disney continued to work on diversity in their films. It's so important for all people to see themselves reflected back from the screen. That was a big plus for this movie.

Nearly everything else is worse. The film follows the exact same path as the animated film and the minor additions it makes are lackluster and underwhelming. I guess they are "okay", but they don't add anything to the story. There's definitely a sense of "we've seen this all before and it was much better the first time".

I thought the cast was average. While I liked the casting of Halle Bailey from one perspective, I did not care for her performance at all. I just can't understand how people watched her work and were impressed. She's okay, but far too wooden in her performance. She spends much of the film as a mute, and her facial expressions lacked enough variation. She hasn't figured out yet how to communicate well enough without using words, so her performance comes across as bland. I admit this is a difficult role for any young woman to play, but Bailey wasn't a great choice. I absolutely believe the movie's quality would have been better with a stronger lead actress.

Jonah Hauer-King was fine. I didn't have big complaints about his performance and he looks shockingly similar to Eric, so I think overall, it was a pretty good casting choice. He works well opposite Bailey. I loved the casting of Melissa McCarthy as Ursula. I'm not a McCarthy fan in general, but it was too perfect of a casting for me to quibble much. Her performance is way too over-the-top, but that's Ursula. I had great fun seeing McCarthy chew scenery in this role. She's definitely one of the best parts of the film. I'm a big Javier Bardem fan, but he doesn't get a whole lot to do here. He looks impressive as Triton, but is relegated to such a small role that it doesn't really matter. Noma Dumezweni and Art Malik both added really nice supporting performances, too.

When it comes to the sea creatures, I thought this movie completely dropped the ball. Sebastian and Flounder are two iconic characters and I absolutely hated how they were depicted here. Sebastian especially looks terrible. The idea of using all CGI is still silly, given this is a "live action" movie, but the crab looks terrible. There's no crab in the world that looks remotely like he's depicted here. The visual effects were awful. I really like Daveed Diggs, but I did not care for his voice work at all here. It's a tough challenge, because Samuel E. Wright's vocals in the original are as perfect as you will ever hear. Diggs seems to try to channel him while doing his own thing, and it just does not work at all. Flounder looks frightening, to be frank. I didn't like how that fish looked at all. He has no personality- I like Jacob Tremblay, but he isn't able to work past the terrible visual effects to make Flounder feel authentic or interesting. He ends up being a total afterthought in this film, when you loved the character in the original. Awkwafina is solid as Scuttle, although the found the character substantially more annoying than in the 1989 film.

I enjoyed hearing the classic songs here, but they are all markedly worse than in the original. Again, trying to remake an all-time classic mostly sets you up for failure. I'm not sure Rob Marshall is a talented enough director to improve on anything- the whole movie gives us bad copies of great things and it's all a bit depressing. "The Scuttlebut" has a few nice moments, but the rest of the new songs felt lackluster.

As a whole, The Little Mermaid does just enough right that I'd consider it a good movie. Marshall has enough experience that he wasn't going to create a bad movie when the blueprint was right there for him. However, it feels impossible to look at this film and outside of the advancements in diversity casting, to feel much excitement about anything. It's good, but miles and miles below the original film. The film made nearly $300 million at the domestic box office, though, claiming 6th place for 2023. So, Disney will continue to high five and keep moving in this direction, oblivious or uncaring that their money-making films are of lesser quality than audiences used to get. That's the state of the company at this point, I guess.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 7



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: The Little Mermaid (1989), Mary Poppins Returns, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken