“The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”

Disney are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel of potential live-action remakes with this one, aren't they? Not a bad thing, mind. The Nutcracker Suite sequence in Fantasia was so aggressively impossible to turn into a live-action picture in the copy-and-paste way of Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King that the filmmakers would be forced, not just bound but forced, to come up with some creative ideas, if they had to be dragged there kicking and screaming. 

So I thought going into it.

Well… 

…oh dear. 

The thing with 2018's Nutcracker and the Four Realms is that it looks magnificent, and the world and plot-hooks are quite nice, and original, and all. The biggest complaint I have with it on paper is that the Nutcracker is an utter non-entity, whose meager relevance to the plot does not even remotely warrant his getting first billing in the title. But as a story, it's fine. 

So the synopsis is alright. Clockwork kingdom, key, mice, life-giving machine for turning toys into recognizable British actors, yes, yes, all good. 

But the script… oh, the script… I don't think I've ever seen a script quite this unfathomably incompetent. Every word that comes out of the characters' mouth is beyond clichéd, and that goes double for the "morals" the movie keeps pushing — we are in literal "all that you need is in here… and this box contains only a mirror" is a territory, folks. The pacing's also rubbish. Everything happens far too quickly; things like the Polichinelles are broughtback for the climactic battle in what is clearly meant to be one of these ‘everything from the first half of the movie comes back at the end’ kind of things, except they feel like they've just been introduced five minutes ago. Nothing has weight. Nothing has time to settle in. 

Also, for a movie pompously retitled The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, it is strangely uninterested in exploring said Four Realms; the only one we ever really see outside of brief flashbacks is the derelict Realm of Amusements. 

There is, of course, a twist villain. She's a reasonably good twist villain, mind, as these things go, but I just thought I'd throw this out there. Disney, stop with the twist villains already. That is an order. And while, as I admitted, it is well-executed, the concept of this one is just… really? It thinks it's way cleverer than it is. “Ooh, the Sugar-Plum Fairy is the villain! Betcha didn't see that coming!” Well, no, I didn't, because it's idiotic. God. 

The cast is a mixed bag. The curiously named Mackenzie Foy is what you expect from the female lead in this sort of movie; perfectly adequate; doesn't make too strong an impression either; but you can't blame her for this because the role is so very very blandly written. Keira Knightley is hammily marvelous as the Esmé Squalor-esque Sugar Plum. Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman, the two main 'name actors', are given barely enough material to make an impression, but they acquit themselves of it quite well. The same cannot be said of poor Richard E. Grant, whose role would already be a paltry cameo were he not encased in a frankly ludicrous make-up job. Jack Whitehall and Omid Djalili (as the dumbly-named guards Harlequin and Cavalier) are, meanwhile, a wholly unfunny comic duo. 

And as for our very nominal male lead Jayden Fowora-Knight (the Nutcracker, here named Phillip), well, the truth is that he's pretty damn awful. He's blander than the screenplay itself, if that's possible. He's such a forgettable slice of nothing that, as of this writing, despite being the male co-star in a 130-million-dollar Disney extravaganza, he doesn't have a Wikipedia page. There's not even a redlink on the cast list of Wikipedia's page on The Nutcracker, which, for the Wikipedia-illiterate, would indicate that the lack of the relevant page is not unnoticed and will be fixed soon. No. Nothing. No one cares enough.

Add to that the fact that James Newton Howard's score is completely clueless as to how to handle the demand to quote and riff on Tchaikovsky's original ballet suite, and so opts to do it as little as possible. 

Really, the visuals and the cleverness of the concepts (when not too impaired by the daftness of the execution) are the only things the movie can rely on. Fortunately, the concepts are clever, and the visuals are breathtaking, so watching The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is still a mostly positive experience. By God it's infuriating, though. 

Post-Scriptum:

• I am seriously wondering if they cast Richard E. Grant as the Ice King for no other reason than because they thought it would be funny for an actor famous for his "icy delivery" to play the part. If so… good try, but Steven Moffat got there before you, and did it much better. 

• The end credits are just Misty Copeland dancing to Tchaikovsky within some fancy (but minimalistic) sets and lighting, and that would have been a way better movie.