‘Beastly’ recreation of classic animation

This film was the undisputed top of the box office charts for TWO WEEKS. It was finally surpassed by “The Boss Baby,” but not by much. This is the world we live in. This is the world we created. And now we have to live with a tale as old as a greedy executive’s mandate, the new remake of “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.”

From Bill Condon, the director of “Twilight: Breaking Dawn,” (that’s right, they couldn’t even get the GOOD Twilight director) comes yet another entry in the increasingly distressing list of pointless live-action remakes of classic Disney films. However, this one is a special snowflake in its own way, as it is the only one so far that is not even trying to pretend like it has a reason to be made, other than fabulous box office results. “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” were technically sequels, “Maleficent” was a re-imagining from a different character’s point of view, “Pete’s Dragon” and “The Jungle Book” added a different style and themes, and “Cinderella” …was also pointless, but at least the original Cinderella film wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of craftsmanship. “Beauty and the Beast,” on the other hand, was the very first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, featured fantastic songs from legendary composer Howard Ashman, and is generally considered to be one of the greatest family movies of all time. We better add a pissing dog joke to that.

But let’s get down to the specifics. The new movie is almost a shot-for-shot, word-for-word remake of the original classic, with about a half-hour of mediocre original songs and dialogue added to stop comparisons to the Vince Vaughn remake of “Psycho.” From the very beginning, the movie makes a terrible first impression with its opening number, mostly due to one fact that plagues the entire film: Emma Watson cannot sing. This is not an opinion, this is a fact. Each and every one of her musical numbers is auto-tuned to such an extreme degree that I wonder if it would not have been better to just have the computer generate a completely new voice from scratch. To say she is miscast here would be an horrendous understatement.

Most of the sets look like they were pulled straight out of “Galavant.” Don’t get me wrong, I think Galavant is a fine TV show. But that is the big problem: This is a high-budget theatrical film, so it should not bear any resemblance to a satirical television program that was specifically designed to look cheap. It was clear that the majority of the budget went to costume design and the CGI beast, who looks like the offspring of Fabio and Grumpy Cat.

While it does become slightly less awful in the third act, it is still an absolute slog to sit through, from beginning to end. Belle and the Beast seem to have no chemistry on screen, most of the new dialogue is extremely arduous, and the mixing on most of the musical numbers adds far too much power to the instrumentals, which tends to drown out the singers. Although I suppose that is a blessing in disguise, when it comes to Watson’s songs…

In short, taken as its own product, the film is an oafish, poorly directed, badly written mess with almost no positive qualities to speak of. Taken as a successor to one of the most beloved cinematic masterpieces of the last 30 years, it is an atrocity.

Though it is clearly too late to stop this thing’s box office success, I nonetheless urge you to avoid laying eyes upon this utter dumpster fire of a movie.

Advocate Staff