It's entertaining. It's a live-action remake of a Disney classic, si you know what to expect. At least they tried. Besides adding some Caribbean flavor and the new songs hit for me. Especially "The Scuttlebutt".



But yeah, "Under the Sea", the best song in the OG, looks terrible here. Javier Bardem is flat (blame that on green screen).
Flounder looks off, but yeah everything else works immensely well.

It's a crowdpleasing movie for sure, but you know what you're getting.

I'm sure people who go for these will go for this one too, but for a movie with a quarter billion dollar budget, the underwater stuff looked AWFUL. They didn't even try. It's all murky and drab, the CGI on the mermaids is appalling (it's frequently apparent that they just put floating actors' heads on CGI bodies, and the lighting is different on the faces, and the heads vary in size from shot to shot, etc), the swimming is unconvincing, and it's just all flat.

So then, for me, I just couldn't stop thinking, "Why would you make this movie for so much money and not work harder to make it look good?" And the answer's obvious. They don't care how these remakes look. They're not there to be good. They're there to be consumed.

So then you get to Under the Sea, which I also thought wasn't good, and from that point on, I'd more or less checked out. The movie fares a little better on land, where the actors aren't just floating heads on CGI bodies. The cast is innocent-- Bailey and McCarthy in particular. Not their fault Rob Marshall is completely graceless at this sort of thing (how was Chicago so good when everything he's done since has been dogshit??), and not their fault the powers that be refused to invest enough time and money into it to make it anything more than a data point to be reported at the Q3 Disney stockholder meeting.

Anyway. I left the theater depressed. Because we're gonna get half a dozen more of these in the next three years, each likely to be more artistically bankrupt than the next. And it sucks. But if this one underachieves, they’ll unfairly blame it on the black mermaid. Which also sucks. Just sucks all around.

Then again, if I had a daughter who liked it, I’m sure the artistic bankruptcy of these ventures, even compared to most other movies made for kids, would probably bother me way less. So maybe the parents reading this have a better chance at successfully extracting value from this.