Who exactly was this movie intended for? I couldn't help but to keep asking myself this as
Maleficent played out, unsure of what it wanted to be, completely torn between two drastically different tones. There was naturally something interesting about this different approach to the current trend of re-telling classic fairy tales in live action form and casting Angelina Jolie as the titular villain guaranteed nothing short of a fair amount of interest but the final result we've been delivered is nothing but a badgering of the original Disney animated film that proves trying something different is truly hard to accept if it isn't done right. While it is easy to give credit to the machine that is Disney for at least attempting to think outside the box rather than simply bringing the same story to the screen with real-live people (though it looks like 90% of the film is CG anyway)
Maleficent is actually less innovative than Tarsem Singh's 2012 take on the Snow White tale. At least that movie had a different rhythm to get in tune with while here we get exactly what we expect and even a little less depending what age group you belong to. So, it was a strong idea with factors that lent themselves towards what could have been an interesting execution yet what we have as the final product is anything but substantial and a film trying to be so many different things it ends up failing on all levels. This brings us back around to the question of who might this movie actually be targeted at? There were certainly a lot of children at the screening I attended, mainly young girls, and throughout you could hear them giggling at the intended bits of comic relief and gasping as Jolie re-created the famous scene in which Maleficent casts her spell on the young princess. To those reactions I began to wonder what I might have thought of this had I seen it as a child. Would it have been one of those my parents might have bought when it came out on VHS and I re-watched over and over? The only equivalent I came up with was Stephen Sommers 1994 adaptation of
The Jungle Book that also came from Disney. It was very much a children's film while playing on the darker tones of the Rudyard Kipling story and that is what first-time director Robert Stromberg (yes, they entrusted this summer tentpole to a first-time director) seems intent on doing here as well, but his over-reliance on special effects and muddled screenplay do nothing but disservice what vision he might have had.
