Blog Entry 1: A Truly Terrible Movie

The first movie that came to mind when I was thinking about terrible movies that I have seen was Disenchanted, which is the sequel to Enchanted. Truly, if I could use one word to describe this movie it would be terrible, so let me begin to explain why.

First off, there is definitely going to be a level of childhood bias behind my review of Disenchanted. Enchanted was one of my favorite movies growing up, and I still believe it is truly one of the best Disney movies out there! The songs are catchy, original, and fun, the storyline is interesting and entertaining, and the character arcs are beautiful!! So, you can imagine my heartbreak when the follow-up movie was completely cheesy (in a bad way), shallow, and so poorly written.

One of my biggest qualms with this film is the fact that none of the characters seemed to be acting like themselves. All the development they had previously gone through went out the window, and the chemistry between Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey’s characters was nowhere to be found. At the end of Enchanted, Patrick Dempsey’s character (Robert) helps Amy Adams’ character (Giselle) to understand and accept the positives of her new ‘Earthly’ reality, while Giselle helps Robert discover the magic to his world! In this film, Giselle constantly is yearning for her old ‘fairy tale life’, as she sings in the first act, even though she had supposedly already realized in the first film that that old life wasn’t realistic or what she even wanted! She quite literally had chosen to stay on Earth, rather than go back to Andalasia. Robert has barely any screen time, but what he does have doesn’t align with his cynical yet newfound optimistic look on life. I understand that there was supposed to be a large gap of time in between the first and second movie, but it doesn’t make sense to completely reverse all the work that was done. It feels necessary to add that they gave the best character, Edward, played by James Marsden very little attention as well! That alone was evidence of a huge mistake in my opinion.

Not only was the screenplay in this movie poorly written, but it was also just lazy. Giselle’s new baby is in the movie for a solid 5 minutes at best, with no real significance for being there other than being a way to jumpstart the plot, which could have been done in at least 15 other (and better) ways. And by moving the whole family to an entirely different town than New York, it loses the fish-out-of-water theme that makes the first film so enjoyable. This also affects the musical numbers! The songs in Enchanted are one of the best parts of the movie, with spectacular flash mobs and intricate dance numbers, but these songs are overproduced and unoriginal, and don’t have any of the magical charm found when they are sung throughout the streets of NYC. All in all, I would not recommend this movie if you were a fan of Enchanted, because I guarantee you will be extremely disappointed.

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