If Disney’s Enchanted was a sly-yet-still-sincere fairy tale mashup, its sequel Disenchanted is more like an overproduced, unnecessary remix, atonal and completely missing the point of the magical, musical synergy the first time around. The premise is certainly promising: Giselle (Amy Adams), the Andalasian maiden transported to the mean streets of New York City, has found her Happily Ever After in divorce lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey) and his sweet daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey). But enough years have passed since that HEA that this family—with Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino) now a sarcastic teenager and a new baby in the mix—feel squeezed out of their Manhattan apartment and flee to the suburbs in the hopes of tapping into that magic again. But when naïve, well-meaning Giselle makes a wish for their lives to be more like a fairy tale, she traps them all in a disingenuous fantasy world—one that transforms her into the wicked stepmother.
Yet the movie never follows through on the relationship dynamics that were established before the spell; it misses every opportunity to have Giselle or Morgan actually say or do something wicked, something hurtful, that will need more than a wave of the wand to fix. Despite Enchanted having a whole song dedicated to how you have to tell someone how you feel, Disenchanted forgot the lesson, with the end result being a vacant-eyed, passive adventure into a briefly entertaining modern fairy tale.
[Read more]
