Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Review

It's been a bit slow for me recently in terms of my theatrical movie reviews. The reason behind that is a bit of a combination of things, but in the meantime I hope you've enjoyed my Halloween reviews. Hopefully I can get around to a few more of those before the end of the month. We'll see. But in the meantime I do now have a trio of theatrical movie reviews to get to you here in the next few days and we start with the fourth movie this year in Disney's series of live action remakes, following "Dumbo," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King." Believe it or not, we're not even done yet this year because next month "Lady and the Tramp" will be debuting on Disney+. "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" was not one I was looking forward to, nor was it one that I thought was even coming out until Disney pulled an audible earlier this year and bumped it up. It was initially scheduled for May 2020, but I'm assuming Disney opened their eyes and realized that "Wonder Woman 1984" was scheduled for the very next weekend, so they smartly put it into a less crowded October. Although that was a smart idea, it didn't quite work out as "Mistress of Evil" opened up to just $36.9 million, which is $154 million less than "The Lion King" and only half as much as the first "Maleficent" in 2014.

What that boils down to is simply the lack of excitement for another trip into this twisted world of Maleficent. Despite performing well, the reaction to "Maleficent" wasn't super positive and the five years between sequels didn't help matters. As I said before, I wasn't looking forward to this movie. The reason for that is I didn't like "Maleficent." I don't want this review to turn into a re-review of that movie, especially since I haven't bothered to watch it again since my initial viewing, but diving back into that movie is going to be a necessary thing for the sake of comparison here because, surprise, I really enjoyed "Mistress of Evil." And I promise you that I am as shocked as anyone, especially since the Rotten Tomatoes score for "Mistress of Evil" (41 percent) is significantly lower than that of "Maleficent" (53 percent). Yeah, sure, "Mistress of Evil" got an A on Cinemascore, but so did "Maleficent," so I didn't put much thought into. I was ready to go and get this thing over with because reviewing the latest Disney movie is always a necessity, right? And I fought the movie. I went in with the wrong mindset, looking for everything wrong with it, just to get this experience over with so I could go have fun with "Zombieland 2." But that's a fight I lost. Disney won me over.

Ever since the drive home from "Mistress of Evil," I've been trying to nail down exactly what went wrong with "Maleficent" so that I could properly compare to how it was handled differently in "Mistress of Evil. And the first thing that I have to point out is that "Mistress of Evil" is not the movie you think it's going to be. I'm not exactly sure what Disney's marketing campaign for this one was thinking, but those trailers are not representative of what this film is. Nor is the title of the movie reflective of the movie's content. Based on the title and the trailers, this felt like a movie that was retconning the first movie in an apologetic manner by turning Maleficent into the evil character that we all wanted her to be. I was a bit conflicted with that idea. Sure, I liked the idea of a super dark and evil Maleficent. This half-baked, wishy-washy version of Maleficent in the first one was not interesting to me, especially since Disney's original animated "Sleeping Beauty" is a heck of lot more dark and terrifying than their 2014 live-action remake. It felt like a cowardly move to pander to a younger audience and thus not have the guts to go dark when in fact the original movie that people have grown up watching for over 50 years did just that. That was one of the major faults for me.

That said, if you're going to commit to a certain route, commit to it. Perhaps I don't like what you're doing, but don't pander to an upset audience. Make the movie you want to make. This is the main point of conversation I was expecting to have here, but surprisingly that's not the conversation we were going to have, despite all the marketing leading me to believe that. In fact, this is very much in the model of the original movie. Maleficent isn't even the villain in the movie. And no, she's not an anti-hero here. She's the straight-up protagonist. The real villain here is Queen Ingrith, mother of Prince Philip, played wonderfully by Michelle Pfeiffer. When Philip proposes to Aurora, and Aurora accepts, Queen Ingrith invites Aurora and Philip to a dinner to celebrate, but also makes sure that Maleficent comes, too. At this point, Maleficent isn't in the best position because, despite doing a great act in loving Aurora and helping her overcome the curse, the city still hasn't accepted her. Queen Ingrith plans on feeding off of that by framing her for an awful wrong-doing, antagonizing her to the point of making her lose her temper, then showing the city how horrible Maleficent is, so that the Queen can lead a massacre of all of the non-human beings that have "infected" the land.

After Maleficent gets shot down while trying to fly away, to Queen Ingrith's surprise, another Maleficent-like creature sweeps in and saves her, taking her to their home. Because, yeah, there's a lot of these Maleficent-like beings. Going over the plot in Wikipedia helps remind me that their race is called the Dark Feys, who are a species of powerful, warlike dark fairies that have been driven to near extinction due to human oppression. They once lived peacefully in the land, but due to being misunderstood, they started getting killed off and went into hiding. Maleficent specifically is one of the last remaining Dark Feys whose bloodline is directly traced to the Phoenix, an ancient Dark Fey ancestor. When Maleficent is rescued and brought to their secret lair, there is debate among them as to how Maleficent can help them. Due to her powerful nature, some want Maleficent to lead them to war against the kingdom, while others hope that Maleficent's treatment and relationship with Aurora can help them peacefully unite with the human race and once again live in harmony. If it feels like I'm going to far into this movie's plot, OK maybe I'm diving a little further than I normally would, but I still haven't crossed into the second half of the movie here, so in my view I'm safe.

Either way, I think it's important for me to describe to you what this movie is actually about since Disney themselves didn't bother. And in telling you what this is about, I can successfully describe to you why this movie worked when the first one didn't. What this ultimately boils down to is the fact that I never bought into the first movie's premise. It didn't make sense that Maleficent would get so angry and curse this young girl, only to then watch over her and slowly fall in love. I didn't feel that arc fit in naturally to the story. I felt like the had a fine enough idea, but the execution was very poor. It certainly wasn't Angelina Jolie or Elle Fanning's fault. They did great in their respective roles, but the writing and the direction just gave them nothing to work with. In contrast, I felt this movie had solid execution. I may have been a bit scarred at their poor interpretation of "Sleeping Beauty," which holds up excellent as one of the better Disney Princess movies. But I was able to accept the fact that what was done was done. I couldn't hate this movie based on the flaws of its predecessor. Instead, I was able to accept the story's mythology and move forward. And I ended up happy about the fact that they owned up to what they did instead of putting together an apologetic sequel.

I was also able to believe the motivations of all the characters in this. Queen Ingrith was representing your population of individuals who are unaccepting of other races, ideals and cultures. She was motivated by fear. Fear of losing power. Fear that her idea of what she think the kingdom should be like would be overrun by a new and different idea that would comprise their current success. Sure, you could maybe call her a bit cliche. But Michelle Pfeiffer relished in the role. She reminded me of Charlize Theron in "Snow White in the Huntsman." Even though the latter movie wasn't quite what it could've been, Charlize Theron relished in this idea of playing an evil queen and so does Michelle Pfeiffer in this. And boy is she good at. But she's also good at putting on a lovable queenlike face that will garner respect from the kingdom while being utterly despicable behind the scenes, pulling all the strings in a malicious plot to get what she wants. And that's what makes you feel for Maleficent and Aurora. Maleficent because you feel her pain of just being stabbed in the back misunderstood and Aurora because she's doing her best to be the neutral peacemaker. She wants to appease her soon to be parents-in-law while also not wanting to antagonize her godmother in Maleficent.

All of this led to the emotion being strong. In the case of Aurora, while Elle Fanning is no longer the young girl she was in "Maleficent" (she was 16 when that movie was released and is now 21), she still brings the youthful innocence to the role that makes her a unique, but interesting version of Aurora. With that youthful innocence, she still hasn't developed enough of a reputation to be able to have a strong impact on the kingdom, especially since she gave her kingdom up and has reigned as Queen of the Moors since the end of the first movie, the Moors being the race of fantasy creatures that live in the land. Price Philip's people are a different kingdom, so when she realizes what Queen Ingrith is up to, there's not much she can do. On the side of Maleficent, when she joins up with the Dark Feys, I feel she is 100 percent justified in her desire to wreak havoc on this human kingdom with how wronged she was by Queen Ingrith and her people. Yet Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Dark Fey named Conall who plays the unbiased voice of reason, trying to get her to make the right decision to establish peace instead of starting a war. His character was excellent. When when some of the other Dark Feys were angry at his proposals, they also felt justified in their emotions.

I'm not going to dive into the ending of this movie. I'll leave that for you to discover on your own. But I will speak in general terms that I thought the ending of "Maleficent" was cheesy and dumb. On the other hand, the ending of "Mistress of Evil" was phenomenal. There's a final battle sequence that has some of the best action that I've seen in a Disney movie. It was a true marvel to behold and brought with it some applause-worthy sequences. The resolution to all of these character arcs was also quite satisfying. I do have some major nitpicks, but I can't get into the specifics of those here. I will say that it is still a Disney movie and that broadly sums up most of these concerns. But overall, I walk out of this experience rather stunned at the final result. I entered this movie wondering if Disney is going to wind up with three entries on my year-end worst movies list (with "The Lion King" and "Dumbo" being the other two). Instead we have a sequel that ranks fairly high up on this list of live-action Disney remakes. Sure, it doesn't hit the heights of "The Jungle Book" or "Pete's Dragon." I wouldn't even put it ahead of "Aladdin" from this year, but it's nevertheless a solid entry into the Disney cannon that I'm going to recommend you give a chance. My grade for "Mistress of Evil" is an 8/10.