‘Disenchanted’ Review: Amy Adams Sequel Breaks the Spell
thewrap.comafter the happily ever after? That’s the cheeky, and intriguing, question “Disenchanted” asks. The answers it comes up with, alas, aren’t quite the stuff dreams are made of.Instead, this straight-to-streaming sequel seems to have been designed with another aim in mind: attracting as many festivity-fatigued families as possible.
And in that, it’s likely to succeed. Because while “Disenchanted” is not entirely enchanting, it is a brightly energetic escape in the grand Disney tradition.Unfortunately, there are other elements from the Disney tradition that should have been left behind.
That, after all, was the point of 2007’s “Enchanted,” a disarmingly post-modern fairy tale that pulled Disney into the present with wit and charm.Fifteen years later, we revisit Giselle (Amy Adams), the erstwhile almost-princess who was pushed from fairy tale animation into live-action adventure with the thoroughly-modern Robert (Patrick Dempsey).
Their update is told as a bedtime story by Giselle’s chipmunk sidekick Pip (a grating Griffin Newman), whose children insist that “there is no after after happily ever after… you just get married, and then nothing ever happens to you again.”It’s a smart start, and a promising one, except that director Adam Shankman (“Hairspray”) and writer Brigitte Hales (“Once Upon a Time”) seem to agree just a little too much.
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