Mulan (2020), but Make it Star Wars

-

In yet another painful 2020 betrayal the Mulan remake tricked me into watching a Star Wars movie. The trailer promised fun highly stylized fight scenes and unfortunately that's all Disney's newest live-action remake has to offer. Mulan is no longer a clumsy-yet-brave heroine who takes the place of her father in the military despite being unremarkable. Now she's essentially a Jedi who has been hiding the forbidden fighting abilities which flow through her veins since she was a child. Instead of watching Mulan grow into a warrior, the audience watches her grapple with whether or not she should reveal that she basically has superpowers.

It's difficult to discuss Mulan without at least making note of lead actress Liu Yifei's controversial political opinions. The actress voiced support for Hong Kong police, who were beating Chinese citizens as they peacefully protested to bring democracy to their country. Bearing this in mind, it makes it difficult to take Yifei's performance seriously as she fights to protect her impoverished family and other families like them.

Politics and Star Wars aside, Mulan staggers under the weight of a plot. Despite having four screenwriters it is virtually indistinguishable from the blandest Marvel movie and falls back on cheap humor out of obligation than any desire to develop its side characters. The film is also stripped of its gender-bending romance in favor of more fight scenes and a new witch character who comes painfully close to being a fun and interesting villain until the writers chickened out at the opportunity to do anything daring. Mulan is so formulaic you could probably guess everything that will happen after the first half hour and be mostly right.

Disney has fallen into the trap of its own hubris. It knows Marvel is doing well, but it's all out of Marvel (for now), so we get this instead. Mulan is a superhero. She never needed to learn how to do cool flips, kick spears out of the air, or grab an arrow as it flies right toward her heart, those are all things she just innately knows how to do. Also, she's not funny or witty anymore she's just weepy and desperate to be strong. Because, as we all know, women can't be tough and have a personality.

I went into this with low expectations, yet I was still disappointed.

Please consider supporting The Foxy Film Fan with a donation on Ko-fi or by subscribing on Patreon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Host Shudder Original Movie Review: The Little Movie That Could

-
Image
The following review of Host  is spoiler free! As the coronavirus pandemic stretches on, filmmakers have found themselves struggling to find innovative ways to continue on in their craft. While movies like Searching  (which is fantastic, by the way) and Unfriended  attempted to provide stories via webcam footage and glimpses of a laptop interface, Host  does it out of necessity rather than due to a stylistic choice. Director Rob Savage uses the pandemic as a realistic backdrop for a relatively simple movie. Due to the technological limitations from actors being restrained to working from their webcams and Host's  devotion to realism, the movie is very brief. It's only 57 minutes long - the length of a free group Zoom call. However, the short length of the movie doesn't hold it back. In fact, it makes Host  a fast and fun horror movie for a season where we can't expect many new films. There's no unnecessary exposition, nor are there lengthy scenes to show us the rela
Read more

The Lodge Movie Review: An Underrated Gem

-
Image
Discussing The Lodge  without spoilers is incredibly difficult, but this review will be completely spoiler free. The basic premise of the horror movie is simple, but admittedly a little strange: two children are forced to spend the holidays with their father's girlfriend in the titular lodge during a terrible blizzard. All three of them are unhappy with an arrangement which sounds disastrous from the start, yet the girlfriend and father decide it's simply what they should do. So, we join Riley Keough in her babysitting adventure isolated in a cabin. My biggest critique is that the writers should have decided on stronger reasoning for Keough to wind up stuck with the two children in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps it could have been a situation more like  The Shining  and less along the lines of "your dad said this is a good idea, so it's clearly a good idea." Silly set-up aside, The Lodge  is decent. The film longs to discuss complex subjects like religious abuse,
Read more

Netflix's Enola Holmes (2020) is Condescending and Dull

-
Image
(The following review is spoiler-free!) "Enola is alone backwards," our protagonist tells us in one of her many monologues. She tells us many things - how she's feeling, what she's thinking, where she thinks she should go next. Her wide gaze is disconcerting and her sunny disposition grating. This isn't Sherlock Holmes, this is Millie Bobby Brown and Henry Cavill playing dress-up. Everything about Netflix's newest release is grating. Its mystery begs us to care for cartoonish characters who speak to us as if we're watching an episode of Dora the Explorer. Showing rather than telling is thrown to the wayside in favor of constant fourth wall breaks to beat your sense of immersion into a bloody pulp. Enola Holmes  wants you to know that you're watching a movie, and that it's the funniest, wittiest, and most important movie you're ever going to see (unfortunately, in light of recent events that very well may be true). From its fast-paced editing to
Read more