I had wanted an Enchanted sequel for years. The Amy Adams movie from 2007 is one of my favorite Disney creations: their version of The Princess Bride, knowingly mocking its own tropes while having a blast making a new princess movie. That being said, the spectre of live action Disney reboots cast its pall over Disenchanted, a major creative letdown that sucks out a lot of the magic of the original movie. I blame the suburbs.
Why the suburbs? Well, Gisele (Amy Adams) and Robert (Patrick Dempsey) have outgrown their New York City high rise. They have their own baby now, and Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino) is now a sullen teenager, making life miserable for Gisele and Robert. Desperate to be happy again, Gisele convinces the family to move to Monroeville, a New York suburb, where “your fairytale starts here.” Or fairy nightmare as it were, as local PTA mom Malvina Monroe (Maya Rudolph) and her two stooges (Yvette Nicole Brown, Rosaleen and Jayma Mays, Ruby) just make the Enchanted family life miserable in new ways. Desperate, Gisele is thrown a lifeline in the form of Nancy (Idina Menzel) and Edward’s (James Marsden) housewarming present, which causes, um, unexpected magical consequences.
Disenchanted’s main story arc is the conflict between Gisele and Morgan, stepmother and stepdaughter. After setting up their frayed relationship, the movie then sends them on separate adventures, putting a great deal of pressure on newcomer Gabriella Baldacchino to carry the movie by herself. She’s simply not ready for that, and given a miserable character to root for on top of it, making the task basically impossible. Edward, Nancy, and even Patrick Dempsey’s Robert are just shoehorned into dumb side plots that at best tangentially support the main story, further frustrating the audience. At least Amy Adams and Maya Rudolph are having fun trying to one up one another, but 1/3 of good really gets hampered by 2/3 of boring.
But the thing that hurts the most is Disenchanted’s soullessness. There was a bite to the original film, which wasn’t afraid to mock big overlord producer Disney for its “princess” storylines for how vain/vapid/misogynistic they were. Disenchanted assumed the magic of the first was instead great costumes and some magical special effects. Well, you can’t gussy up hollow garbage. The songs, wonderfully memorable in Enchanted, are dishearteningly forgettable in this one, lacking any emotional significance or even humorous elements. There’s I guess a kernel of an idea here when it comes to making life a fairy tale, but that all gets lost in the window dressing and CGI emptiness. Despite Amy Adams’s best efforts, the corporate machinery of IP eats up and spits out Disenchanted, ready for mass consumption and zero retention for Disney Plus subscribers everywhere.
What a bummer. With their miserable live action rebooting track record, it looks like finally Disney is looking inward and trying to fix what has gone wrong the last few years. Hopefully, the Mouse corporate machine realizes that just churning out soulless content eventually won’t keep people coming back for more, and they’ll start partnering with creative people and collaborating on movies instead of mandating IP. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself and we’ll get Reenchanted in 2024.