News that Disney’s live-action(ish) remake of its 1989 animated hit The Little Mermaid would star African American musician and actor Halle Bailey provoked the racist #NotMyAriel hashtag, with Fox News-fed “replacement theory” wingnuts philosophically frottering themselves into a frenzy of fear and loathing.
Yet now that the film is finally upon us, it’s hard to imagine how something so utterly innocuous – not to say bland – could have caused such upset. OK, so this doesn’t have the timeless cartoon magic of the original (be honest, what “live-action” Disney remake does?), and the two-and-a-quarter hour running time is stretching a point. It’s functionally good-natured rehash fare, bogged down by some watery CG and a few uncomfortable dips into “uncanny valley”, yet buoyed up by Bailey’s winning titular performance.
Director Rob Marshall reunites with Mary Poppins Returns screenwriter David Magee, while musicals man-of-the-moment Lin-Manuel Miranda serves as co-producer and songwriter alongside the original film’s composer, Alan Menken. Daveed Diggs and Awkwafina inject a little comic oomph into their weirdly photorealist characters (a crab and a bird respectively), Javier Bardem oozes parental protectiveness as King Triton, and Melissa McCarthy channels the drag-queen spirit of Divine as the Sea Witch Ursula, centrepiece of an impressively spectacular FX finale.
