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Showing posts with label MOVIE REVIEW: MULAN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MOVIE REVIEW: MULAN. Show all posts

Monday, September 7, 2020

MOVIE REVIEW: MULAN







































To save her ailing father from serving in the Imperial Army, a fearless young woman disguises herself as a man to battle northern invaders in China.

Director: Niki Caro

Cast: Liu Yifei, Donnie Yen, Tzi Ma, Jason Scott Lee, Yoson An, Ron Yuan, Gong Li, Jet Li

Release Date: September 4, 2019

Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence

Runtime: 1 h 55 min

Review:

The live action remake of Mulan is visually impressive in spots but ultimately it suffers from the same issue that has plagued the other Disney remakes, it feels perfunctory and soulless.  Niki Caro does fare better with this film than some of the other directors tasked with these cash grabs.  Caro has a clear eye for sweeping visual and she takes full advantage of their filming locations.  I’d assume that’s where the majority of the film’s massive budget was spent.  The strange thing is that sequences vary from realistically epic to overly artificial with an over reliance on CGI, so much so that some scenes are jarringly choppy.  Caro can’t seem to decide if she wants to keep the film grounded or go full on fantasy, so she straddles the line between both leaving the film with an uneven tone.  The script doesn’t help matters since it keeps everything overly self serious with no tangible sense of fun.  The cast is consistently wooden and emotionally detached from their characters with only Gong Liz and Tzi Ma leaving any sort of impact.  Liu Yifei does what she can in the lead role but she’s never engaging enough to make the audience care about the character’s journey.  This might be a bit easier to forgive if you just ignore the fact that there is a superior version of the same story available.  Only a few moments really land the way they were intended, which is a shame because you get the feeling that there was a better version of this film in there somewhere. 

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