I’m going to skip over the whole conversation about Disney’s Live Action Remakes since I already briefly talked about it in my Peter Pan & Wendy review last month, anyway The Little Mermaid had me a bit worried. When the trailer dropped myself and a few others said that Halle Bailey would be the standout but mostly everything else would fall flat, it’s a common pattern that happens with a lot of these live action remakes. However as I said before in my reviews I like to be proven wrong when it comes to film and to my surprise…The Little Mermaid did just that.
The Little Mermaid is very flawed, the underwater parts don’t exactly look all that great as there are moments where the CGI is very noticeable. Javier Bardem gives a pretty poor performance as King Triton, Jacob Tremblay as Flounder is a very lifeless performance and Awkwafina as Scuttle is yet another addition to her bad performances post The Farewell. I’m not going to on a huge rant about the rap Awkwafina sings in the movie. I really don’t have that much to say about it, it’s bad of course but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. To be quite honest I found it more unnecessary and very unfitting than bad, it comes right out of nowhere and ends shortly after and is never spoken of again.
Now moving on to what really worked for the movie, let’s start with of course Halle Bailey who was the standout. Her film career is going to go very far and it really shows here, she captures the spirit of Ariel while bringing her own direction to the character, her acting really shines through when the film goes to the land portion of the film. Her screen presence is genuinely charming and she naturally connects with the rest of the cast, even if I didn’t like some of the other performances such as Awkwafina or Tremblay there is absolutely no denying that she connects with them easily.
Daveed Diggs as Sebastian took me a little bit to get used to, but he really did a great job. His version of Under The Sea is a whole lot of fun and he really does capture the character quite well, Melissa McCarthy as Ursula was also pretty solid obviously there is no topping Pat Carroll (voiced Ursula in the original) who delivered one of my favorite performances of all time. With that said I do think McCarthy did a pretty good job with what she was given, absolutely far better than some other depictions of iconic Disney villains (looking at you Jafar from Aladdin (2019). Finally there’s Art Malik who plays Grimsby, he’s genuinely fun and is just a very charming character. He’s a prime example of a fun side character that gets the job done quite well.
The music was surprisingly pretty great, I say surprisingly because yes while Rob Marshall director of Chicago (one of my favorite films) is in the director’s chair. This is Disney we are talking about, the music in these live action remakes have always been a hit or miss or some movies will have a few good songs and the rest would just be very forgettable. However that wasn’t the case here with The Little Mermaid, minus the previously mentioned rap. The rest of the songs are pretty well done renditions of the original songs, Under The Sea is a lot of fun, Kiss The Girl is one of the film’s highlights and Part Of Your World is truly fantastic due to Halle Bailey’s powerful singing voice. Which is why the music works so well the singing voices are truly great especially Halle Bailey who as I said before has a tremendous singing voice.
Lastly there’s Rob Marshall’s direction, his approach of “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it” is truly effective here, especially in terms of story. Rob Marshall’s touches on the music is absolutely felt here and he really does a fantastic job of connecting the cast to one another, there’s some genuinely well done moments of chemistry between Halle Bailey and Jonah Hauer-King.
Overall The Little Mermaid (2023) is quite solid, it’s definitely flawed but it’s a genuinely fun little film that manages to be a lot better than a lot of the other live action remakes.
The Little Mermaid is currently in theaters.
7/10 B