Moana (PG, 115 minutes)
Rating: Three out of five stars
Verdict: Pointless remake
There are flickers of warmth in Moana, Disney’s latest live-action adaptation of one of its own hit animations.
The question of $200 million (the picture’s reported budget) is whether this is enough to overcome the feeling that we as an audience are being sucked in by yet another exercise in carefully crafted charm.
That’s the cynical view, but Disney barely bothers to hide the fact that their overwhelming priority is generating dollars, not delivering fun.
The 2016 Moana was a huge success, both critically and commercially. The live-action version replicates it almost shot for shot, line for line.
It offers very little originality, almost nothing we haven’t seen and heard before in animated form, using CGI instead of drawings to bring us the story’s cute piglet and comical chicken.
So no matter how hard the daughter of the Polynesian chief Moana tries to return the missing heart of the goddess Te Fiti, which will restore her ruined island to its former lushness, the real essence of this film is the pursuit of money.
On the plus side, young Australian actress Catherine Laga’aia is a find in the title role (disheartening as it is to hear her speak with an American accent when her antipodal vowels were right in the first place).
Engaging and charismatic, she forges a lively chemistry with the powerful Dwayne Johnson, who plays the character he portrayed in the animated film (and in the 2024 sequel Moana 2): the narcissistic demigod Maui.
Young Australian actress Catherine Laga’aia plays Moana in Disney’s latest live-action adaptation of one of its own hit animations
Dwayne Johnson, better known as The Rock, plays Maui, the character he played in the animated film
The folks at Disney’s bells and whistles department do a really nice job of making Maui’s tattoos move, which must have been much easier to animate, so there are some good reasons to see this movie, but only if you know nothing about the original.
If you do, you’ll wonder why they bothered to make a replica… except to the extent that you won’t wonder at all.
Evil Dead Burn (18, 110 minutes)
Rating: Two out of five stars
Verdict: Grotesquely violent
Why bother making another film in a horror franchise that goes all the way back to Sam Raimi’s 1981 film The Evil Dead?
Well, they still make money. A lot actually. And Evil Dead Burn is perhaps the goriest and most insanely violent of them all, which is exactly how some people like it.
Actually, it hardly bothers with a plot. A French woman named Alice (Souheila Yacoub) is married into a cursed family that lives in a creepy house.
That’s basically it: the springboard for a series of murderous rampages that become almost comical in their increasing ridiculousness.
There are hardly any scares or chills; it’s just nasty supernatural mayhem with chainsaw beheadings and worse, with flashbacks to what director and co-writer Sebastien Vanicek treats as regular, everyday, non-supernatural violence, committed against Alice by her “hot-headed” husband in a restaurant kitchen.
Earlier this week, the chairman of the public inquiry into the 2024 Southport attack, which killed three little girls, said society is “faced with a growing challenge from violence-fixated individuals.”
But that doesn’t matter. Evil Dead Burn hits theaters everywhere on Friday.
Pruning rose bushes (18, 97 min.)
Rating: Two out of five stars
Verdict: superficial satire
Rosebush Pruning is about another dysfunctional family, and here too there is violence, not to mention the suggestion of incest.
It’s a dark psychosexual satire about extreme wealth, in the same vein as Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or-winning Triangle Of Sadness (2022), though not nearly as mischievously edgy.
The always excellent Tracy Letts, credited only as The Father, plays a blind, demanding patriarch, whose adult children – three sons and a daughter – are encouraged to live worthless, sybaritic lives.
They all live in modernist splendor in Catalonia, having moved there from New York City.
There are strong echoes of the TV series Succession in the twisted relationships between the siblings, but Rosebush Pruning isn’t as good as that either.
It is indeed a thorough waste of considerable talent, although the casting of Callum Turner as one of the spoiled rich sons provides at least a small touch of art imitating life, given Turner’s extravagant Sicilian wedding to pop star Dua Lipa recently, which reportedly infuriated the residents of Palermo by shutting down parts of the city.
Turner plays Ed, with Riley Keough, Lukas Gage and Jamie Bell as his siblings Anna, Robert and Jack – and Elle Fanning as Jack’s girlfriend Martha, who, like poor Alice in Evil Dead Burn, discovers she has fallen into a troublesome family.
And that’s before we discover a bizarre secret about The Mother (Pamela Anderson), apparently beaten to death by wolves.
Frankly, Karim Ainouz’s film, written by Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Efthimis Filippou, is wildly stylish on the eye but disappointing on the mind.
Pamela Anderson plays The Mother in the dark psychosexual satire about extreme wealth, Rosebush Pruning
Also show
Forget Harry and Jude, this is England’s best double act
As you may know, and although I can’t speak for the other home countries, this is a weekend to be immensely proud of England and Englishness, and to find joy, perhaps even hope, in one of the greatest of all English double acts.
Football, which football? I’m referring to the reissue of Aardman’s ‘claymation’ masterpieces A Grand Day Out (1989) and The Wrong Pants (1993), which turned cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his faithful dog Gromit into national heroes long before any of us had heard of Kane and Bellingham.
To mark 50 years since Aardman’s first production as a professional animation studio, all their classics return to our cinemas this summer.
The first of these was A Grand Day Out (You, 23 minutes, five out of five stars), in which, as you’ll no doubt recall, our resourceful couple discovers they’re out of cheese, so build a rocket to fly to the moon (which is made of the stuff, of course).
If they had chosen to go to the corner store, we might never have heard of them.
As for the wrong pants (You, 30 minutes, five out of five stars), I remember Nick Park, the genius behind Wallace and Gromit, telling me what a royal equerry once told him: that on Boxing Day 1993 at Sandringham, Prince Edward rounded up the whole family – ‘even Princess Margaret’ – and made them watch it on TV.
Another royal stamp of approval came when Camilla told a group of schoolchildren that Wallace and Gromit were her husband’s “favorite people” in the world.
And now they’re back on the big screen in a cracking (and blessedly short) double bill.
Wallace and Gromit are depicted in Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Pants (1993)
Whatever happens on Saturday at the World Cup, I’m already on cloud nine (with a Wensleydale flavor).
All films are in cinemas from Friday.
