Mark Reviews Movies: CINDERELLA (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 2, 2021

Cinderella, writer/director Kay Cannon's version of the old fairy tale, isn't quite the story we remember. There's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it almost feels like the only approach to this particular tale at this point, considering how many straightforward and respectful adaptations we've seen by now.

The basics more or else remain the same. Cinderella (Camila Cabello) is still the servant-like stepdaughter to a cruel stepmother. She longs to escape, and a ball, in which a handsome prince is looking for his future bride, could be the answer to her worries. There's some magic, with mice transforming into footmen and a grand carriage forming from something else, and a glass slipper comes into play. We know those basics like only a few things from the realm of stories, because generations and generations have passed them to children, who grow up to be adults who pass them to another line of children and so on.

Cannon adds a few twists and subversions, though, and while they're fairly predictable, such elements at least add some new things and, in this movie's best moments, a different tone to familiar material. This one, like our newest Cinderella, plays things with a bit of a smirk.

It's a shame, then, that Cannon can't rest with the simple but potentially defiant notion of playing this old story with a few laughs at the tale's expense. Some of that approach is here. We can see it in Cinderella's assertion that she doesn't need a man to be happy, when she instead could have a promising career as a fashion designer, or in the prince's early, not-so-charming ways as partyer, who'd rather spend time drinking and riding with his buddies than waste his time looking for a proper wife (We almost think Cannon might be really daring in her subversions from some of that, but it's not to be).

Those character details and some of the more upfront humor definitely work here. There's a decent comedy in between the more traditional beats, and there's a better one lurking between the lines of characters and jokes that we do get. Ultimately, though, Cannon relies a bit too much on a traditional way of thinking—maybe not in terms of the changes to this tale, but definitely in terms of what a modern-leaning adaptation of a classic fairy tale has to do to get some attention.

Basically, that translates into well-worn story becoming something that's starting to feel almost as trite. Here, we don't just get a slightly rebellious version of Cinderella's story. We also get a jukebox musical, with a soundtrack composed of assorted pop songs from various decades, as well as a couple of town-crier raps and two original songs thrown into mix (The latter exist, one supposes, to give its singing star a new single for the charts and the movie a chance at some awards). If Cannon's adaptation is a comedy that needs a bit more commitment for it to work, the movie is also an uninspired and flat musical, which probably should have spent the energy working on the comic bits.

A plot summary, of course, is useless. Despite some significant changes to what Cinderella wants for her life, the story mostly proceeds as we well know it. The prince is Robert (Nicholas Galitzine), whose father the king (Pierce Brosnan) wants him to find a wife so that the royal line is secured (Minnie Driver plays the tired-of-politely-smiling queen, and Tallulah Greive plays the spying princess, who actually wants the power of monarchy, in order to do some good). Cinderella, watching a royal pronouncement and catching the prince's eye by speaking up to his father, has dreams of owning her own fashion business.

Her stepmother Vivian (Idina Menzel), though, wants Cinderella and her stepsisters (played by Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer) to marry well-to-do men. Conflicted between her business dreams and her attraction to a disguised Robert, who promises to be at the prince's ball, Cinderella eventually decides to attend the dance, aided by her magically fabulous godmother (Billy Porter, in an extended but amusing cameo).

Every song—with selections from the likes of Queen, Ed Sheeran, Salt-N-Peppa, and Earth, Wind & Fire—is song with some degree of aplomb by the cast, although Menzel's version of a Madonna song shows that the younger stars—especially its pop-star lead, who is still charming and funny otherwise—still have some work to do. Every song is equally and clumsily crammed into the plot, and any sense of comedic or iconoclastic momentum is undermined, well before our romantic leads share a song-and-dance duet of a ballad.

Cannon is of two minds with her version of Cinderella, resulting in a fight between a generically safe musical and a cleverly subversive take on the fairy tale. The latter mode might have worked, if not for the near-complete investment in the former.

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