Mark Reviews Movies: DISENCHANTED

Disenchanted, Walt Disney Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 18, 2022

It has been 15 years since Enchanted, the story of a cartoon princess who discovers her happiness after being transported into the real world. Because it's the trend these days, here's Disenchanted, which sees that former princess becoming just a bit disillusioned by how ordinary and confusing the real world can be. That's a solid concept, to be sure. With the return of Amy Adams as the charming embodiment of everything that decades of animated films about hopelessly optimistic and naïvely romantic princesses have taught us, director Adam Shankman's belated sequel at least has one element upon which it can depend.

Adams is again—and, again, not intending to make a pun but using the most appropriate word—enchanting as Giselle, who found love and a family as a result of her adventures in New York City. It's a bit jarring to find Giselle still singing and constantly smiling her way through life after several years of existing as a real person in the real world, but that was the strength of Adams' performance in the first film—to fully convince us of and endear us to this character, whose apparent perfection easily could have become annoying.

By putting us right into her continued cheeriness and peppiness, the polite smiles on the faces of her family members, as she sings about this or that, take on a just tinge of hidden frustration. It's little surprise that, even after all this time, Giselle's only friends in the city are pigeons, rats, and cockroaches.

There's probably a more cynical story to be found in here about the limits of patience with someone like Giselle, but to Adams' credit, those thoughts are fleeting. The movie's own shortcomings, failure to recall that its predecessor's sense of humor was its other major selling point, and unwillingness to do anything unique certainly help distract us from those darker thoughts, too—unintentionally so, of course.

At the start of this story, Giselle is lured to the suburbs by a billboard promise of a place like the idyllic kingdom where she was born and raised. Her husband Robert (Patrick Dempsey) is fine with idea, especially after his family has grown by one with a new baby, but Giselle's stepdaughter Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino), who's now a moody and sarcastic teenager, is not a fan, to say the least.

Giselle is thrilled, even though the house is still being renovated. Robert, though, is haunted by the prospect of becoming a commuter on the same train until the day he dies, and Morgan is embarrassed by Giselle's attempts to put everything in a positive perspective. When the teen calls her stepmother by that technically correct term, the former princess begins having an identity crisis of sorts. From her experience, stepmothers are only wicked, after all.

The bulk of the plot has this suburban locale transforming into a quaint village out of a fairy tale. The means of this include a magical wand—brought to Giselle by family friends, as well as the new baby's godparents, Edward (James Marsden) and Nancy (Idina Menzel), the new rulers of the animated land—and Giselle's wish to change the world to better suit her. Brigitte Hales' screenplay never quite establishes any stakes of note, save for the potential of Giselle becoming completely and irreversibly wicked when the clock strikes midnight.

Mostly, this story is a collection of half-considered ideas, from Giselle's conflict with Malvina (Maya Rudolph), a real estate broker in reality but a manipulative queen in the fairy-tale alteration, to Robert's new fantasy-world role as a knight in search of adventure. Robert fails to battle a dragon and a giant in that latter subplot, which feels more like some contractual requirement for Dempsey's participation (just as Menzel gets a couple of songs and Marsden probably had other obligations—or "obligations"—to guarantee what amounts to a two-scene cameo).

There are songs and some musical numbers, but Shankman takes them, as well as the entirety of the plot, so seriously that one wonders if anyone involved recalls the original film's winking-and-nudging attitude about such things. A brief return to the animated realm only makes us acutely aware of the movie's creative and/or budgetary limitations, although the rest of it—from the set design, to the costumes, to the visual effects—aren't exactly hiding them. Disenchanted still has Adams, at least, but sadly, she's not nearly enough to compensate for this movie's misguided ways.

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