Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: Fairly Entertaining Spectacle

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil starring Angelina Jolie attempts to lend the antagonist of Sleeping Beauty a more ameliorating persona is rather mish-mashed in terms of ideology.

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
U/A; Adventure, Family, Fantasy
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sam Riley, Harris Dickinson, Ed Skrein, Michelle Pfeiffer
Director: Joachim Ronning
Rating: 

This follow-up (rather inevitable) to the 2014 box office attraction is predictably programmed to deliver the goods in a similar bouquet - with a new evil queen, a titular character who looks evil but is benevolent, a fairytale young romance that is so sugary sweet that it has the power to triumph over all evil and overwhelming computer-generated imagery to make it all look like the fantasies (Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty & several other cross-media expanded adaptations) this work has amalgamated.

This attempt to lend the antagonist of Sleeping Beauty a more ameliorating persona is rather mish-mashed in terms of ideology while the target audience it hopes to attract is a little older and more aware of the world around them. Tiny tots might find this version a little too scary and unpalatable given the war scale dynamics of evil that it throws up as an end play.

Watch the trailer of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Ingrith the scheming Queen of Ulstead (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the one who engineers a faceoff with a rather reticent Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) while the latter's adopted daughter, Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) goes into blissful incandescence following the dashing Prince of Ulstead, Philip's(Harris Dickinson) marriage proposal. But the 'sleeping' beauty here is not the Princess, you can be sure!

Disney's in-house writer Linda Woolverton (Maleficent, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mulan, Alice in Wonderland) ensures that her team (Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue) connect all the dots but it's the visual wizardry that makes this a lively affair. Three little pixies from the first film, played by Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville, a winged warrior Conall (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and several other old and new characters add-on enough spice to keep this experience fairly magical.

The action though, fails to find firm ground. It all looks too unreal. It's also a little stupid to suddenly show Maleficent and her winged warrior tribe succumbing to attacks when legend has them having recuperative powers that no human can hope for. The scale of the climax is grandiose but the effect is not. Norwegian director Joachim Ronning gets our juices flowing up to a point but there's not much to gush about other than the look, costuming and luminosity of the lead actors. Angelina Jolie, looking svelte and enigmatic can't be expected to act given those sharp computer generated cheekbones, Michelle Pfeiffer is competent as the evil Queen while Elle and Harris make charm their target. Despite the bloated effects and generic storytelling, this film does manage to entertain!

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