Review – Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast is the fifth live-action adaptation of a Disney animated classic following Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), and Pete’s Dragon (2016) (we don’t count 2010’s candy-colored Alice and Wonderland). When it comes to these remakes, what exactly are we looking for? Are we looking for a near shot-for-shot remake of the original animated film? A reinvention of the classic story? A little bit of both? Cinderella was closer to the shot-for-shot version, as was The Jungle Book, though they both have their own unique vision due to their visionary directors. Beauty and the Beast is definitely a bit of both, which has it’s positives and negatives.
The story of the film is the same. Belle (Emma Watson), a peculiar girl and the only person in the village who seems to know how to read besides her father Maurice (Kevin Kline), is held captive in a castle by a cursed, monstrous-looking prince (Dan Stevens) and his quirky team of knick-knacks as the two go from despising each other to falling in love.
The movie starts off with a bang. From the opening shot you can tell this is going to be a visual treat, filled with beautiful sets, stunning costumes, and the classic, beautiful score. It starts with giving us a deeper look into how the Prince became the Beast and is followed by classic song, ‘Belle’, where we get our first glimpse of the town and Emma Watson as Belle. Watson looks good in the part, but her singing voice falls flat on some of the higher notes and she misses some of the emotional punches later in the film. But that opening song is something to behold. It is a pitch perfect vision of animated film and gave me goosebumps while watching it.
The movie has a few songs and moments that really wowed me, like ‘Gaston’ and ‘Be Our Guest’, which starts off a little underwhelming but ends up an extremely bright, colorful, glorious feast for the eyes, especially in IMAX 3D, which is the way I would recommend watching the movie in. The bigger, the better. I also loved Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gad as LeFou. They were perfectly cast and really bring these characters to life. The voice work of the Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, and the rest of the gang who voice the talking knick-knacks is excellent and adds a nice comedic touch to the film.
Beauty and the Beast is far from perfect, however, and for a number of reasons. I think the biggest problem is director Billy Condon, which is rather shocking and disappointing. Condon is a musical director, having written Chicago (2002) and directed Dreamgirls (2006), which are two of the best musicals of the 2000’s. His ambition with this film got the best of him, as he made the movie far too long by adding unnecessary aspects to the film. For instance, we get a side story about Belle’s mom, which is just glossed over, yet still takes up far more time than needed and brings in this weird book that lets them travel to different places in the world, I guess. There are also added songs in the film, which aren’t horrible, just useless. If they were going to add more songs, why not add songs from the Broadway version, like the powerhouse ‘Home’? I also hated the climactic fight between Gaston and Beast, as it was nowhere near as brutal or intense as the one from the animated film. All of these flaws culminate into the films biggest issues, which is it’s runtime and pacing. At just over two hours, the movie is nearly 40 minutes longer than the original animated film, and you notice every minute. The movie drags greatly in the second half, which really hurts a lot of the films emotional power that made the animated original so great.
Is the live-action Beauty and the Beast the masterpiece the animated version is? Unfortunately, due to unnecessary added scenes and songs and being far too long, it fails in that regard. But, it is still a visually stunning, beautiful movie with some great performances and classic songs and scenes and will surely continue the success of Disney’s live-action reboots.
MY RATING – 2.5/4
Did you see Beauty and the Beast? What did you think? Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.