Review of Maleficent (2014) by Harry W — 19 Apr 2016

Despite its mixed reviews, with unanimous praise going towards Angelina Jolie's performance, Maleficent sounded like it was worth the viewing.

The script in Maleficent is poor. In one key dramatic scene, Maleficent boastfully places a curse on baby Princess Aurora which will drive her into a deep sleep when she turns 16 and touches a spinning wheel, which removes the element of surprise from her evil deed. She then explains that the only resolution to the curse is true loves kiss, which reveals how to bring an end to the curse. After all that, she proclaims that the curse will go on until the end of time even though she has just explained how to put an end to it, and this all happens before the movie is even a third complete. This kind of writing is some of the most incompetent crap I have ever seen in a Disney movie. It turns Maleficent from a villain into a joke, making it a challenge to take the film seriously. Considering that the darker moments of the film are overshadowed by the juvenile comedy in the film, taking the entire feature seriously is rather challenging. But there isn't even much time to grasp the incompetence of the screenplay in Maleficent because director Robert Stromberg is so desperate to distract viewers from this that he puts the pacing of the film into overdrive and fills the film with eye candy. If the story wasn't thin enough already, the fact that it just rushes through it makes it stretched all the more thinner. The visual elements of the film remain intriguing, but Maleficent is more devoid of narrative than I ever could have imagined. I found less creativity in the revenge concept of Maleficent than I did in the 1978 revenge story I Spit on Your Grave. The differences are that while the visuals of Maleficent remain superior, the premise uneasily mixes revenge elements with fairytale fantasy which results in a tale that rushes through an excess of tonal inconsistency with nothing more to offer than style. In his directional debut, Robert Stromberg remains a distinctive visual artist which is the main thing anyone would walk out of Maleficent having enjoyed due to the fact that the scenery and production design work to ensure that the time period of the story and fantasy universe setting of the feature seems all the more believeable. The visual effects are also detailed, even though Maleficent as a whole is clearly excessively reliant on them. Despite its visual flair and strong editing as well as the nice musical score of the film, Maleficent is so shoddily constructed in terms of narrative that it genuinely frustrates me. I don't expect too much from fairytale films because they adhere to convention thoroughly often, but usually in the hands of Disney they end up having some sense of fun to them. With Maleficent, the film deviates back and fourth between taking its narrative seriously and using its themes for comic relief without ever finding any sensible balance between them, so any actual plotting in the film just gets in the way of the potential enjoyment viewers will find in it.

One controversial topic about the film is the idea that the scene in which King Stefan drugs Maleficent and removes her wings is an allegory for rape. The idea of this is ridiculous considering that his actions are clearly ones of reluctance, the reluctance that prevents him from actually killing her. It sends her into a vengeful state where she gets back at him by taking it out on his daughter. The premise is a generic one from many crime films where someone is tortured and left do die only to come back for vengeance. His actions do not mirror that of a rapist as he commits them under command of someone else who manipulates him through promises of power. But even then, a film as poorly conceived as Maleficent can hardly be taken with anything except a grain of salt as clearly there is nothing within the subtext of the story that isn't yet another fairytale cliche. There is no way that anyone involved in the production of Maleficent could have actually thought the premise through enough to point that out because the story is the main source of the problems since it is so underdeveloped and predictable most of the time while just plain confusing at others. The motivations of the main character keep on changing from sadistically villainous to heroic, and there is no settling on if she's a hero or a villain. But either way, she is an unsatisfactory character and so building an entire film around her does not end up paying off when there is nothing conceivable to tie her story together. The one good thing that the film does for her character is casting Angelina Jolie in the role.

Though I commonly find Angelina Jolie to be a seriously overrated actress, her role as the titular character in Maleficent is one of her greatest to date. It seems like the role she was born to play because the beauty image the media has exploited all over magazine covers ends up fitting the role correctly, only to have it turned into one of darkness as the tale explores its lurid material about her story. She is not a great character, but her performance is rock solid because she actually manages to make the inconsistent motivations of the character seem believable. She grasps the role with a firm power over the role, going between being dominating and sympathetic without problem. She really makes the experience a better one.

But despite the visual flair and performance from Angelina Jolie, Maleficent is incompetently written both in terms of story and script which ensures that it is unable to milk its thin and rushed premise well enough to make this tale of a supporting character sufficient enough in any manner which can be considered intelligent enough to warrant viewing.