The endless music video montage means the film doesn't build any dramatic rhythm, while Gillespie's ever-roving, faux-Scorsese camera rarely finds an idea or an image that he allows the audience to savour.
If I never hear Nina Simone's Feeling Good used in a Hollywood movie again it'll be too soon. He skins Cruella alive, unleashing a jukebox of corny needle drops – from The Clash and Blondie to the one Rolling Stones song you all know is coming – like a bad wedding DJ, wallpapering the film's soundtrack even (and especially) when the songs bear no relation to the action on screen. The culprit seems to be Gillespie, an advertising-schooled director who – as was the case in the dreadful I, Tonya – has never met a scene he couldn't indiscriminately slather with a tired pop music cue. Stone, who also serves as an executive producer, is a perfect fit for the part, with her Disneyland-English accent, sardonic smirk and wide, mischievous eyes, but the film can't quite tap her natural, unhinged energies and allow them proper rein. Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Demi Moore and Julianne Moore were rumoured to be in the running to play The Baroness. Thompson, whose character's amusingly dismissive cruelty feels like the input of co-writer Tony McNamara ( The Favourite), seems to be having fun, and there are moments – squirting her lackeys in the face with perfume popping a champagne cork in a hapless waiter's eye – that have a deliciously mean-spirited streak. With such a rich sandbox to play in, and so much acting talent – an intergenerational Emma versus Emma – it's odd that Cruella feels so lacking in personality, never locating that spark of genuine weirdness that might have made it land as a classic. ( Supplied: Disney)įor a spell the film plays as The Devil – or should that be DeVil – Wears Prada (Aline Brosh McKenna, that film's writer, gets a story credit here), but soon the discovery of a dark family secret sets the young designer directly on a path of revenge.Įstella's psychotic alter ego Cruella is born, and a full-on design war of performance art fashion stunts erupts between her and the Baroness. Gillespie went back and watched heist movies like Ocean's Eleven to help plot out crime caper elements of Cruella.
When a London-bound trip with her desperate mother (Emily Beecham) ends in tragedy – yes, Dalmatians are involved, because would you imagine it any other way? – the young Estella ends up an orphan on the streets of the foggy city, where she falls into the company of two thieving urchins by the names of Horace and Jasper.Ī decade later and the motley trio are enjoying a lucrative life of low-level crime in glam-era London, with budding fashion designer Estella (Emma Stone) sewing the gang's disguises while the goofy Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) and cunning Jasper (Joel Fry) provide the muscle. It begins in the 60s, with the future villainess – birth name Estella – as a bullied, outsider child (played by Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), her shock of two-tone hair, split personality and penchant for wreaking havoc among her oppressors already fully formed. (Don't look for any realistic economic squalor here.)Įstella's look was inspired by New Wave singer Nina Hagen the Baroness's style was influenced by Christian Dior, Joan Crawford and Elizabeth Taylor. Give me single, sinister and stylish every time.ĭisney seemed to acknowledge this with Maleficent (2014), their confused attempt to flesh out the evil doyenne of Sleeping Beauty, and now – in a spirit not unlike Warner Bros' Oscar-winning meme magnet Joker (2019) – they've turned their attention to Cruella, the dog-napping high-fashion priestess who made the animated One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) (and its 90s live-action remake) so much more fun.ĭirected by Australian filmmaker Craig Gillespie – whose depiction of another troubled beauty queen in I, Tonya must have endeared him to Disney executives – Cruella is an origin story of pop's most infamous fur fetishist, loosely intended as a prequel to the Glenn Close film and set in a hyper-designed 70s London that it wears like a pair of knock-off, mall-bought Doc Martens.
For an empire built on family-friendly entertainment, one of the great ironies of Disney has always been the enduring, irresistible appeal of its villains.Īfter all, who'd want to be Snow White, pining for some pallid prince, when you could be the wicked, magic-mirror-wielding queen or aspire to be The Little Mermaid's boy-besotted Ariel, when the fabulous, Divine-inspired sea witch Ursula is right there?