Bewitchingly bad

WHEN you work in the writer’s department at a big film studio and you’re short of creative ideas, what do you do? Go back through the extensive archives and put a modern spin on an old classic, of course!
 
Maleficent is exactly that, a live-action and modern twist on the 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty. Instead of following the journey from the perspective of the famous Princess Aurora though, Maleficent switches the story round to the eponymous antagonist. While the premise is certainly intriguing, the execution is ultimately flawed.

The story begins with a young Maleficent (Jolie) travelling around The Moors, the magical kingdom in which the film is set. She meets and falls in love with Stefan (Copley), a peasant boy whose mutual affection directly conflicts with his ambitions to become king.

After she uses her fairy powers to defeat an invading king he offers to make whoever kills Maleficent his successor. Stefan takes it upon himself to complete this task but stops short at the last moment as he remembers his old feelings for her. Instead, he burns off her wings and presents them to the king as proof of her death.

When Stefan is crowned king, Maleficent realises what has happened.

She forms a dark, oppressive kingdom and names herself queen, quietly waiting in the shadows for years plotting her revenge.

The opportunity arrives when she turns up uninvited at the ceremony to welcome Stefan’s new-born daughter, Aurora (Fanning).

Motivated by hatred, betrayal and the notion that true love is nonexistent, she curses the young girl and proclaims that on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into an eternal sleep.

As anybody with a childhood will know by now, the only thing that can wake her up is true love’s kiss.

I’ll start with the positives first. Jolie totally owns her role as the evil queen. Her make-up and outfitting is superb, and she delivers her lines with a brooding authority that underlines her part as the queen of all evil.
 
Even more impressive though is how she manages to underplay her role at times, delivering moments of levity and subtlety which belies her larger-than-life character. It’s Jolie’s first film for four years, but it’s clear she has lost none of her acting ability amongst the media circus that is her relationship with Brad Pitt.

Unfortunately, it seems like director Robert Stromberg decided to base the film around Jolie’s casting rather than the characters which inhabit the world he’s trying to paint.

There is a strong tonal dissonance between the character of Maleficent and the other characters she interacts with, as if they’re on a completely different plane of existence.

There is no chemistry between the actors and many scenes leave you wondering whether the actors were actually together at all, or whether they were filmed separately and spliced together in an editing studio.

It doesn’t help that the secondary characters are dreadful and one-dimensional. Copley, who shot to fame with superb performances in District 9 and Elysium, surprisingly delivers a shockingly bad Scottish accent more stereotypical than Irn Bru n’ haggis. Honestly, it makes Mike Myers’ effort in Shrek sound like Sean Connery.

Fanning is even worse as Princess Aurora, who takes a bizarre laissez faire attitude to the tragic events going on around her. It’s too much of a distraction that rips you out of the yarn that the story is trying to spin when the main character in peril seemingly doesn’t care about her plight.

The overall story is probably enough to put you in a coma akin to Sleeping Beauty’s.

The adult moments are likely too emotionally dark and complex for a small child to understand or be able to connect with, whilst the elements designed to engage children are poorly executed and such a jarring shift in tone that it makes the film a jumbled mess.

The visuals are sometimes outstanding, but special effects are overused and some of the creature design seems to be taken from the cutting room floor of a low-budget design studio.

The sound-track is uninspiring too; there are no tracks in this movie that will join the pantheon of Disney classics.

Ultimately then, this film should probably have been called Jolie rather than Maleficent. She shines in her role no doubt, but it’s a shame the director appears to have built the film around her at the cost of a decent story and fleshed-out supporting characters.

* Showing in Cineco, Seef II and Saar Cinema