Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Little Mermaid’ on Disney+, A “Live-Action” Remake That Will Leave You Pining For Traditional 2D Animation

The Disney Commodities and Exchange Dept. recently produced The Little Mermaid (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), its latest calculation in the form of a movie. It’s also among the corporation’s growing library of “live-action” remakes (read: they’re mostly photo-realistic CGI), which either have us stimulated by their visual prowess and/or modern thematic sophistication (Peter Pan and Wendy, The Jungle Book, Cinderella) or irritated by their pointless redundancy (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio). Director Rob Marshall of Chicago and Into the Woods fame once again tackles a musical, revisiting songs from the 1989 Little Mermaid, with some new ones punched-up by Lin-Manuel Miranda; the cast includes relative newcomer Halle Bailey alongside veterans Javier Bardem and Melissa McCarthy. So will they freshen up this old story, or just leave us feeling drowned in its superfluity? 

THE LITTLE MERMAID: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Humanity and the mer-folk have been at odds for TOO LONG. Just look at this jerk: A seaman, leaning over the edge of his ship, aiming his harpoon at what he believes to be a mermaid (but is just a dolphin). The only enlightened one around here is Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), who stops the harpoonman from killing something based purely on smoothbrained superstition. Meanwhile, deep below the surface, Ariel (Bailey) is at odds with the idea of being at odds with humans. She’s obsessed with the legged ones, secretly collecting their lost artifacts while her father, King Triton (Bardem), preaches separatism. He also tut-tuts his daughter’s shirking her mermaidly duties, whatever they are, probably just making scheduled appearances here and there while looking nice, which is basically the job of every child of a monarch, right? She skips a meeting with Triton and her bevy of sisters to go with her fish pal Flounder (voice of Jacob Tremblay) to snoop around some shipwrecks, where they’re chased by a big hungry shark for no reason other than the makers of the movie crunched some numbers and decided something exciting needed to happen at this point lest they risk losing our attention.

As Eric and his shipmates celebrate the “coral moon,” a sudden storm pushes the vessel smack into some jagged rocks. Thankfully for Eric, Ariel, curious and yearning – do you yearn? I yearn – to be human, was stalking them, and she swims to the rescue, leaving his unconscious body on the shore, but not before getting a big fat eyeload of his outrageous handsomeness. This makes Triton super pissed: Why in the hell did she save that guy? Who does she think she is, someone who respects all life or something? Meanwhile, on dry land, we find ourselves smack in the midst of a parallel conflict: Eric’s adoptive mother, Queen Selina (Noma Dumezweni), forbids him from ever going out on a boat again. His duty as the prince is to sit in a castle and be bored and not drowned. And what we have here is generational conflict, where the powerful conservative olds refuse to listen to the progressive youngs and force them to do their bidding and therefore force them to be defiant rebels in order to be happy, which is the kind of thing that should get their parent licenses revoked if such things existed (and maybe they should?).

At this point, we meet Ursula the Sea Witch (McCarthy), who’s Triton’s sister even though he’s half-fish and she’s, I dunno, part kraken? The lower half of her body is, like, a whole bunch of gross tentacles. Are they half-siblings? Like, her dad was Cthulhu and his dad was Charlie the Tuna or something? Anyway, Ursula knows all about Ariel’s yearnings. And Ursula yearns, too – to topple her brother and rule the seas. So she talks Ariel into trading her siren singing voice for some legs, and part of the deal of the spell is, she has to kiss a prince in an act of “true love” in order to remain human permanently, otherwise she’ll become Ursula’s slave. Of course, Ariel agrees to this deal, because desire has clouded her judgment. And lo, she’s pulled from the deeps and delivered to the castle and clad in a – gasp – dress and, despite being unable to speak, manages to charm Eric, who has yet to put two and two together and realize she’s the one who rescued him. If all this is starting to look like a powder keg about to be hit with a spark, well, you’re right. Oh, and this whole time, everyone’s been singing.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In terms of CG depictions of underwaterness: Avatar: The Way of Water > Aquaman > The Little Mermaid. 

Performance Worth Watching: Bailey gives it the ol’ college try, but she’s swimming against the current of the movie’s top-to-bottom water-treading futility. Awkwafina’s casting as the voice of wacky seagull Scuttle is relatively inspired; for my nickel, everything’s better with Awkwafina in it. 

Memorable Dialogue: Triton comes to his senses, finally: “You shouldn’t have to give up your voice to be heard.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Full disclosure: The 1989 Mermaid is a beloved classic that leaves me dead-cold. I watched the new Mermaid hoping it moves away from the original’s backwards-thinking story about a female protagonist who wants to fundamentally change who she is for the sake of earning a man’s love (all together now: yuck!) in lieu of something more enlightened – which it doesn’t really do. It steps away from that regressive fodder, but does nothing with Ariel, rendering her a watery and bland character with a vague desire for change. She maybe could’ve yearned for peace between sea and land folk, you know, a greater cause tied to her own desire. She maybe could have ruminated on one of the conundrums of the human condition, balancing the need for personal evolution while you accept who you are. Change is constant; stagnancy is death.

But Marshall’s movie – written by David Magee – isn’t particularly interested in ideas. His primary M.O. is to paint ugly CGI atop nostalgia while embracing bloat (it’s a deadly 52 minutes longer than the original) and artifice. Jon Favreau’s Jungle Book looked stunningly real; this Little Mermaid looks like sludge. It’s the visual equivalent of heavily processed, nutrition-deficient foodstuffs. You don’t have to squint that hard to see McCarthy and Bardem’s faces digitally pasted into wads of unsightly bric-a-brac. Sometimes, the screen bursts with vivid color, but mostly it’s cluttered with so much overwhelming detail, it makes one pine for the simple pleasures of traditional 2-D animation.   

Neither is Marshall particularly interested in the characters or their emotions. The prince is right off the rack, Ariel is an empty vessel and Bardem and McCarthy get no opportunities to indulge their gifts in the art of scenery devourment. There are no standout sequences; the movie just strings together musical bits, exposition and mindless action without building much suspense. Its most inspired idea is giving Awkwafina a new number to rap, but it lacks snap, fails to draw a laugh, and feels unceremoniously wedged in. Nothing in recent memory feels so much like amalgamated groupthink capital-C Content like this Little Mermaid. 

Our Call: The Little Mermaid is pretty lousy, but following on the heels of David Lowery’s surprisingly substantive Peter Pan and Wendy (now on Disney+ – go watch it!), it looks even worse. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.