Cruella (2021)

My first reaction when I heard about "Cruella", was not a reaction. It was an "ignore" for yet another recycled production stemming from the more and more present lack of imagination at Hollywood. And to give an argument for that, at a quick count, in 2019 - the last pre-pandemic year, the top box-office stats show a score of 26-to-7 (if I didn't miss something) for sequels/reboots/spin-offs/etc vs fresh stuff = featuring a new subject. So, the idea to squeeze out a villain origin story from the "101 Dalmatians" didn't catch my attention. Especially since I don't really like prequels. So, how did I end up watching this: 1) I was looking for something more recent, and I actually found a couple titles, but 2) at 2 AM before going to sleep, knowing that probably it won't work in one view, Id didn't want to fragment watching something else. So, I told myself, ok, let's see how Disney managed to get something that was received better than the previous attempts for a live-action version of the classic animation. Obviously, as in many situations where my expectations were rock bottom, the final impression is way higher, but I'll try to be objective.

I must say that my first surprise after watching this was the complexity of the story - not that it is very complex, but I was expecting.. nothing. I didn't read "101 Dalmatians" the book, but I can assume that it doesn't get too deep into Cruella's origins, so in that case, we can give a plus to the writing. I also don't want to get too deep into the story, but in brief we're starting with the childhood of the character, who from start manifests a split personality between Estella and Cruella, something like a light version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. It doesn't take long, and the girl loses her mother in tragic conditions, ending up as member of a pickpocket gang with Horace & Jasper, who we know from the animated version. Years pass, and by some fortunate series of events Estella manages to make a career shift from thief to her dreamjob: a designer hired by the most select fashion brand in London, owned by The Baroness - the negative character in the movie. And from here we have a bit of a soap opera, and as in any soap if we tell who, how and when met the path with somebody else, we'll spoil too much.

What the movie tries, especially in its first part is to humanize a character who we know it's a bad one from the classic story. And it's not just Cruella, it does it even more with Horace & Jasper. That's something that for me seemed a bit too forced. Especially since, in its second part, it doesn't go that far in the opposite direction, up to where you would expect seeing how Estella is turned into Cruella. In the end it's a Disney movie in 2021 - let's get real, seeing dalmatians as fur coats nowadays, a bit too sensitive. In any case, the movie rolls as a light comedy from start to its end, which probably helps in all this character development, in the sense that you can't take it very serious neither when Cruella is Estella, nor when Estella is Cruella. In general, I like such an approach, because when the light storyline gets broken for inserting the drama, that has an impact that's much more clear and strong (I can only think at "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" now as an example). We have something pretty similar here, at the climactic point of the soap part, about two thirds in the movie, which gives the whole thing some force, but it's still too little. You would expect to hit you harder with something at the end, but, well... it's a Disney movie.

Leaving the story aside, I don't know... it seemed to me that the rest of the departments that got involved in the movie had pretty much the same expectations as I did from the subject, and gave everything to counterbalance it. Let's not spend much on the acting, where Emma Stone confirms me again that she's probably currently the best actress in the Hollywood generation born in the '80s. For the technical side, pretty much everything from production design to VFX has a shot to whatever awards will be given next year, although typically the movies targeting that get a release during the fall-winter season. I'm reserving a bit more space to mention the soundtrack. I don't remember another situation where I've heard such a good mixing between arrangements of known songs and an original score. Actually.. I don't remember any other case like that. At Tarantino for instance, where we find quite often the first approach, I don't know for instance if in "Kill Bill" was any piece of original score. Well, here we have both - again, I don't know who should get more credit for that - the composer, Nicholas Britell, or the sound mixing department, but the result is probably enough as a reason to clearly recommend you to watch this movie.

To conclude, I'm probably not the only one who sees "Cruella" as a sort of "Joker" made by Disney. That's my final impression. Which probably loses something from the drama, but also even more probable is more appropriate for a period when the reality around is dark enough, so you won't feel the need to see that so poignant also in a movie :)

Rating: 4 out of 5