Just to be clear, it’s not necessarily a bad notion to take a beloved children’s tale and morph it into a new version of “Les Miserables." But it’s been done before and better — just recently with “Wicked, Part I.”
In “Snow White,” a benevolent king and queen preside over a kingdom where the citizens feel a communal loyalty to their rulers and each other. But the queen dies, the re-married king disappears, and the new evil queen militarizes the kingdom and reduces her step-daughter, Princess Snow White, to a household drudge.
The film follows the musical pattern set by the Renaissance of new animated Disney classics of the 90’s. The heroine has an intro song about her wishes and her dreams. The wicked queen gets a big musical number — just one, fortunately. Gal Gadot is more effective being haughty and hissable.
Rachel Zegler, when she’s singing, commands the screen reasonably well. Otherwise, she’s bland and predictable and strong because the script says so. Unfortunately, Zegler was more memorable in the well-known viral clip where she smugly condescended to the original 1937 classic.
After Snow is cast out into the forest, she isn’t saved by a prince, but bickers her way to true love with a bandit named Jonathan, played by Andrew Burnap. There’s little chemistry between the two, and Jonathan comes off like a jerk with his song number, “Princess Problems,” where he scolds Snow for not realizing that the world is a harsh, unfair place. Did he not notice that she’s been a scullery maid half her life?
Jonathan lives in the woods with a multicultural group of outlaws. There are seven of them, by the way. We could speculate that the original plan was to present Snow White and the Seven Colorful Companions.
Controversy ensued, however, about whether to dwarf or not to dwarf. In the end, the movie now gives us seven dwarves — provided by CGI in this supposed live-action remake.
Director Marc Webb recreates the cottage scenes from the 1937 original with energy and sparkle, even including some of the legendary songs. But these segments feel Scotch-taped into the movie. They could be removed entirely without disrupting the whole Snow-White-leading-the-people’s-revolution story line.
Although “Snow White” gets two stars out of five, I’m expecting the artists involved will go on to better movies.
But I hope the movie’s failure is spectacular enough to slap some sense into Hollywood. If I had a prescription from a Doc, the moguls would get over their Dopey, Sleepy addiction to tired re-makes, uninspired sequels and lazy messaging. Audiences are Grumpy about this diet of mediocrity and aren’t Bashful to say so. We’d be Happy to see some good, original stories, and that you can’t just Sneeze at.
