Descendants 3 (TV movie)

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Descendants 3  (B).  After a saggy and disappointing middle installment, the trilogy ends on a high note.  King Ben’s plan to let more “villains’ kids” leave the Isle of the Lost gets scuttled after Hades (Cheyenne Jackson, TV’s American Horror Story) nearly escapes from the Isle.  Meanwhile, envy gets the best of Sleeping Beauty’s daughter Audrey (Sarah Jeffery, Be Somebody) after Ben proposes to Mal, and she steals Maleficent’s staff from the museum (surely the worst guarded repository of dangerous artifacts in the world) so that she can conquer the world.  The original VKs have to team up with Uma and her crew to foil Audrey’s wicked schemes.  This installment features some of the best songs in the series, especially the father–daughter duet “Do What You Gotta Do” by Hades and Mal (Dove Cameron, Descendants).

Descendants 2 (TV movie)

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Descendants 2.  (D)  This sequel kicks off with a very catchy opening musical number in which the Villains’ Kids seem to return to their wicked ways by brewing up a bunch of magical apples that turn all of Auradon Prep’s goody-goodies bad.  But that’s just a daydream, and the rest of this sequel is decidedly unmagical.  Maleficent’s daughter Mal (Dove Cameron, Descendants) seems to have it all, but she is plagued with self-doubt and eventually decides to chuck life at Auradon Prep and return to the Isle of the Lost.  There we meet our main antagonist Uma (China Anne McClain, Grown Ups), daughter of sea witch Ursula.  Uma captures King Ben (Mitchell Hope, Let It Snow) and demands Fairy Godmother’s magic wand for his release.  After a big swordfight in which the VKs rescue King Ben from Uma’s pirate ship, the movie drones on and on but nothing else really happens.  I hear the third Descendants movie is better, and I know it has some catchy songs, so fingers crossed….

Descendants (TV movie)

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Descendants  (B).  This 2015 Disney TV movie captured my four-year-old goddaughter’s heart–or at least the musical numbers did.  In this fairly clever tale, the princesses and other good characters from all the Disney movies have come together to make a lovely country called Auradon.  All the Disney villains have been banished to The Isle of the Lost, just off Auradon’s coast and sealed with a magical force field.  Through some strange system of governance, Ben, the teenaged son of King Beast and Queen Belle, is about to become king, and he decrees that four of the villains’ children will be allowed to leave the Isle and go to school with the good people’s kids at Auradon Prep.  Maleficent (Kristin Chenoweth, Bewitched) instructs her daughter, Mal (Dove Cameron, TV’s Liv and Maddie), to get the Fairy Godmother’s wand and use it to release the villains from the Isle.  But will the handsome and kind Ben turn Mal aside from her wicked scheme?

Onward

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Onward  (B).  I don’t know if you have be a Dungeons & Dragons player to appreciate this recent Pixar offering, but it certainly can’t hurt.  In the world of Onward, magic is real, as are lots of mythical creatures like unicorns, elves (who look more like trolls than like Legolas), centaurs, and manticores.  But the creatures have given up magic in favor of technology, which is much more reliable, and now they live in a modern suburban society just like ours.  Nevertheless, through a series of unlikely events, two very dissimilar elvish brothers, Ian (voice of Tom Holland, How I Live Now) and Barley (voice of Chris Pratt, Passengers), embark on a quest to find a magical jewel that will allow them to reincarnate their long-deceased father for one day.  Will they succeed?  Will their quest bring them closer together or tear them apart forever?  The story is decent, but I mostly enjoyed the D&D tropes.  The brothers’ encounter with a gelatinous cube deep in the bowels of a trap-filled dungeon is a highlight.  (And if you don’t know what a gelatinous cube is, google it and click on “Images”!)

Frozen II

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Frozen II  (C).  I must say that this sequel to the Disney juggernaut Frozen left me cold   <rimshot>.  Maybe it’s because the first film really wasn’t set up for a sequel, but this one felt tacked on and arbitrary.  Despite the previous film’s happy ending and Arendell’s apparent prosperity under Queen Elsa’s benevolent rule, the Queen is restless and unhappy, imagining that she hears a siren song calling her north.  It turns out the royal family has a complicated backstory—as a boy, the girls’ father, King Agnarr, accompanied a mission to an enchanted forest in the north, and for some unknown reason hostilities broke out between the Arendellians and the locals.  Agnarr was the only Arendellian to escape before a wall of mist (reinforced with a magical force field) sealed the forest off from the world.  Now Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, and Olaf (somewhat more amusing in this film) must somehow penetrate the mist (which they easily do by the simple expedient of having Elsa go first) and find out what’s going on inside.  There’s a lot of running hither and yon, and lots of magical “explanations” that made no sense to me.  Plenty of songs, most of which are OK.