The curling branches that cover his body in a dark stranglehold are almost as successful a depiction of modernized magic as the portrayal of the witch herself. The magic itself also works, and the make-up work on the “beast” is quite good. From her enormous and ridiculous hairstyles down to her ornately strapped shoes, not only does she grab the eye of the audience on her own but is also intentionally placed in an otherwise completely normal aesthetic. The costumes are wonderfully over the top. The one thing that writer/director Daniel Barnz gets absolutely right is how to update the magic itself. Thankfully, there’s Mary-Kate Olsen (and yes, I am fully aware of the unexpected nature of the sentence). It seems that there’s just no way out of this conundrum for “Beastly” by even maintaining the very basic skeleton of the story and the characters, the film is condemned to stay one-dimensional. There she sits, loudly independent in speech but condemned to fall for the guy keeping her up there, held hostage for reasons that seem dubious even though we see things completely from his perspective. There’s certainly a concerted effort to make the character more independent and self-actualized, but this effort doesn’t actually extend to taking her out of the attic. The same is true for the distant father, an unfortunately misused Peter Krause.Įven Beauty herself, Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens), is an example of this struggle of definition. See what the problem is here? You can’t make stock characters interesting by adding a single, equally simple attribute, no matter how talented or charismatic the actors may be. She’s an immigrant, with a husband and kids back home in the Caribbean he’s blind. Magda the maid (Lisa Gay Hamilton) and Will the tutor (Neil Patrick Harris) were clearly written as creative ways to riff on the classic supporting cast of the film. When you take one of these stories and move it to live action 21st century New York City, suddenly the typical fairy tale cast members turn into uninspired and badly written tropes. The witch, the princess in the tower, the friendly but one-dimensional supporting staff (often just that, domestic servants), all of these tropes populate the Disney classics and seem totally in tune with the style of the film. In Defense of the Reboot: How Remakes Can Still Result in Great TVįairy tales are simple, and they deal in character archetypes.
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