Camila Cabello

Nicholas Galitzine

Idina Menzel

Billy Porter

Pierce Brosnan

Minnie Driver

Maddie Baillio

Charlotte Spencer

Tallulah Greive

James Acaster

Romesh Ranganathan

James Corden

Ben Bailey Smith

Rob Beckett

Luke Latchman

Fra Fee

Jenet Le Lacheur

Mary Higgins

Beverley Knight

Natasha Patel

Nikkita Chadha

Vinani Mwazanzale

Lisa Spencer

Nakai Warikandwa

Keith Harrison

Paddy Glynn

Anne Smith

Linda John-Pierre

Alex Bourne

Arazou Baker

Peta Cornish

Nandi Bushell

Manny Tsakanika

Chanelle George

Danny Salomon

George Gjiggy Francis

Jason Redshaw

John Alan Roberts

Henry Braham

Stacey Schroeder

Paul Kirby

Ellen Mirojnick

Kay Cannon

Tobias Poppe

Kevin O'Connell

Ai-Ling Lee

Dan Kenyon

Mildred Iatrou

Malte Bieler

Charles Perrault

Kevin Day

James Flanagan

Chloe Kletsa

Corrine Silver

Chloe Reynolds

Sanaz Missaghian

Mia Hope Radford

Tarun Malla

Tara Mason

Keith Sellers

Kate Xagoraris

Brooke Lyndon-Stanford

Martin Bell

Colin Nicolson

Jessica Weiss

Mychael Danna

Leo Pearlman

Jonathan Kadin

Nigel Evans

Shannon McIntosh

Louise Rosner-Meyer

Steven Lawrence

Stephen Swain

Kathryn Pyle

Victoria Zalin

Matthew Beckwith

Andy Bennett

Christoph Cordell

Lucy-Jayne Murray

Ansko Pitkänen

Stevee Davies

Tamsyn Manson

Olly Tellett

Fantasy

Romance

Comedy

Cinderella

Fulwell 73 Productions

Columbia Pictures

United States of America

English

musical

evil stepmother

woman director

fairy godmother

human becoming an animal

happy ending

cinderella

jukebox musical

cinderella story

romantic fantasy

CinemaSerf

I tried, I really did! I hoped that the fairly decent, experienced, ensemble cast coupled with state of the art visual effects and a collection of modern-day pop lyrics would breathe new life into this timeless story. Well, sadly, that was all just a triumph for optimism over, well, just about anything... It's terrible. Good looking, well produced, but terrible. Am I the only person left alive who is fed up being shouted at by Edina Menzel? Pierce Brosnan demonstrated in "Mamma Mia" (2008) that he is happy to play parts with his tongue in his cheek, but here I fear he must have cringed when he saw; likewise Minnie Driver and a whole host of British comedians led by the ubiquitously un-talented James Corden. Billy Porter tries a different take on the fairy godmother character but features all to sparingly to make much impact on an otherwise extremely pedestrian interpretation that reached it's nadir with the cute but totally wooden pairing of Nicholas Galitzine (Freddie Mercury would spin in his grave) and Camila Cabello. Sorry, maybe if I were 6 years old and had nothing to compare this with, I'd not be so harsh - but I'm not and this is poor, really poor...

Cinderella is a jukebox musical, based on a classic fairy tale, with CGI animals, and the now obligatory ethnically diverse cast (though oddly relegated to the extras; all of the main characters, with one exception that we'll get to later — and that's certainly not Camila Cabello —, are of the Caucasian persuasion. 

It's like, how much more lazy could this writing be? And the answer is none. None more lazy. To put it in perspective, Lin-Manuel Miranda's so-called songs from Hamilton or In the Heights are all over the place, but at least he sat down and committed them to paper himself (and you can tell from the result that he did without any help at all). 

Conversely, what we have here is the worst of two worlds: on the one hand, covers so watered down they constitute sonic homeopathy, and on the other, original songs so bland that they make the covers sound good in comparison.

As bad as, say, Rocketman is, at least it's a jukebox musical that makes sense; after all, one expects to hear Elton John songs in an Elton John biopic. This of course doesn't change the fact that, should I want to listen to John's version of “Pinball Wizard”, I'm going to watch Tommy, not Rocketman. 

By the same token, if I want to see a Cinderella musical, the gold standard is still the 1950 Disney version, which contains original, plot-relevant songs that they were written expressly for the film — as opposed to a glorified playlist that fails miserably at the two most important functions a song has in a musical: moving the story forward and developing the characters (how exactly a medley of “Whatta Man” and “Seven Nation Army” is going to accomplish either of those things, I haven’t the foggiest) — especially considering that YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, etc. allow me to easily enjoy the superior, genuine article performed by the artists who wrote and/or recorded it in the first place. 

As for the exception to the 'inclusive' cast that I mentioned above, it's the Fabulous Godmother; played with overflowing exuberance by Billy Porter; this is the only character endowed with a life of its own, something for which the actor, and not the script or the director, deserves exclusive credit. The rest — even (sigh) Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver — are so opaque and forgettable that they might as well have been as computer generated as the animals

First 8 Minutes

Official Trailer

Official First Look

Cinderella( 2021)

One shoe to rule them all.

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A review by CinemaSerf

Written by CinemaSerf on Sun Mar 27 2022

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