Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)

Well this was a letdown. 
I thought the first movie was outstanding, so I had fairly high expectations for this as a sequel. 
“Disappointed” would be an understatement.

Throughout the entire movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a ham-fisted attempt to rewrite the events of the first movie, as if the director was picked and told “make a sequel” and they responded with “but I have all these great ideas for an original!”
For example: both in “Sleeping Beauty” (1959) and “Maleficent” (2014), it was Aurora who was cursed, not any one particular spinning wheel, which is why King Phillip had all of the spinning wheels in the kingdom destroyed (which, in retrospect, must have done a number on their economy as thread could only have been imported for 16 years). For some reason, in this movie, it was the spindle on one spinning wheel that was cursed, and while Aurora had already fallen victim to, and recovered from, the curse that Maleficent had put on her, said curse was somehow still active on one spinning wheel, like a poison, that was then used on other people.
Meanwhile, the opening monologue of the movie told us that in the five years lapsed between stories, the people of ‘the kingdom’ remembered what Maleficent did but forgot why she did it, and now they just feared her again. This makes a little bit of sense, as it became immediately clear that Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) traipsed off to the magical land of the Moors to reign there, abdicating her duties as the heir to the human throne and leaving the kingdom entirely to the peasants; Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) even clarified that she specifically left the castle to the people, which must have led to some horrific bloodshed as the locals fought over who should get the throne. It was later revealed that this rekindled fear was orchestrated by Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer), so I understood the how and why, but it was the kind of forced transition that existed solely so the plot could happen and didn’t feel organic in the slightest. 

Speaking of Queen Ingrith: from the get-go, it was telegraphed that she was evil. There was no pretense that she was good, or pretending to be good, or had thought about being good at any point in her life. It would have been more subtle if Ingrith had simply looked at the camera and said “I’m the bad guy.” She dropped eves just outside open doors, hid in dark corners, snuck around, and had her very own secret passage to a secret industrial-sized iron forge.
In a monologue about her backstory, Ingrith relayed that as a child, her father the king (of yet another country that bordered the Moors) was faced with famine while the Moors appeared to have plenty. That king sent a prince to ask for food, the prince never returned, and thus Ingrith blamed the Moors for every problem in her life and the collapse of her former home. It was a loser’s take on the “Grasshopper and the Ant” tale from Aesop’s Fables.
I’d like to take a moment to note that the creatures in the Moors were both the plant and the animal life, so presumably a bushel of Moor wheat was also thousands of sentient, vocal wheat strands, which would have made every loaf of bread an unending nightmare of massacres. 

The B-plot was about the creation of an entirely unnecessary MacGuffin of magically-enhanced iron shavings used against the residents of the Moors. It was never clarified why this was necessary, as regular iron had been well-established to be deadly in this world, so converting the iron from ‘regular’ to ‘magic’ was purely for the sake of padding the run time. Furthermore, these magic iron shavings were predominantly used in high-altitude shrapnel attacks for a particularly stupid “aerial” fight scene, where the iron exploded in to clouds, then just hung around in the sky in a way that not even colored smoke does. The entire “battle” felt like every single battle scene from “Game of Thrones”: stupid, misguided, and clearly clearly choreographed by someone who’s never once had to think about anything more strategic than which toilet paper to buy.

The three Faeries from the animated film – those blithering Pink, Green, and Blue idiots – returned again, unfortunately. I desperately wanted someone go after them with a fly swatter, but instead two survived while the third got turned into a sentient plant, which was somehow a positive.

Prince Phillip went through a mild transition: Brenton Thwaites was replaced by Harris Dickinson, which was a noticeable change as he was the only returning character who wasn’t played by a returning actor. It didn’t change anything about the character though: he was still a white dude with a British accent who mostly just hung around on the fringes of scenes and occasionally popped up to say things to remind us that he was still technically a main character.

There was an entirely unnecessary new all-CGI character that we were punished into witnessing. It was a tiny humanoid porcupine thing, and apparently a girl. I can’t tell you exactly what it was or why the director wanted to include its horrifying antics and sound effects as the D-plot, but I can tell you it was an affront to God and I hope that creature haunts the dreams of whichever animator came up with it.
Oh, and the porcupine thing loved a sentient mushroom, because of course it did.

Gerda (Jenn Murray) was the page/handmaiden to Queen Ingrith. Somehow, despite being a real human being, she sat so perfectly in the uncanny valley that it made me deeply uncomfortable every time she was in a scene. She also had a sadistic, almost sexual enjoyment, from killing the Moor creatures, which was more than a little disturbing to watch as she did it over and over and over again.

While director Robert Stromberg had no problem killing off King Stefan (Sharlto Copley) in “Maleficent,” director Joachim Rønning did not kill Queen Ingrith in this. Instead, Maleficent turned Ingrith into a goat, which didn’t produce nearly the same cathartic results, considering how bluntly evil Ingrith had been. Maybe you could take this as an easter egg, as Pfeiffer previously played Lamia the witch in “StarDust” (2007) where she turned a farm boy into a goat, but that seems like a stretch for a flick that didn’t have nearly as many references as the previous movie did.

There’s a weird pacing concept with fantasy series where the second movie is used to reveal some kind of previously unknown, paradisiacal homeland for whatever Being the first movie was based around. This happened in “Kung Fu Panda 2” (2011), “How to Train Your Dragon 2” (2014), and to a lesser extent “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (2009). 
I understand why: the first movies were used to set up the stories and the conflict with their respective one-off Beings, while the sequels allow for expansion and thus discussion of the greater world. World building is never bad, but this specific trope is very common and is now boringly predictable, especially as those lost lands are always some kind of utopia where more of those beings live in harmony, only to get ruined in some way as the plot of the sequel. The residents of that perfect homeland will just have to live wherever the protagonist decides, because somehow being the protagonist means that they know the best spot for a new mass colony.
This movie followed that color-by-numbers trend: Maleficent found some far-off colony of Dark Fae (of which she apparently is), who somehow have a mass cave-nest with impossible lighting and four entirely distinct ecosystems. The Dark Fae have just been existing in this cave, despite having magic and the power of flight, which means they really should have succeeded at enslaving, or at least subduing, any human threat. But they’re in hiding, because of course they are.

Maleficent, who spent the first film being quite eloquent despite her rage and pain, spent this movie being tongue-tied and seemingly incapable of properly forming a thought or explaining her actions. At one point she was accused of committing a crime that clearly wasn’t her fault, and instead of simply saying “that wasn’t me,” she just stood there and stared, which, of course, immediately made her the guilty party despite sharing the room with Queen Ingrith.

Also: Maleficent’s bust kept changing size. Drastically. She had no less than five different outfits throughout the movie, and with each outfit came a different body shape, for no explainable reason. The only thing that makes sense is that the outfits that were CGI simply didn’t render a bosom for her, while the actual costumes were inexplicably padded.

And let’s talk about the title: Maleficent wasn’t evil in this movie, and she wasn’t evil in the last one. None of her actions, as displayed to the audience, could be construed as ‘evil’ without taking a veryskiwompus view of the story and everyone else’s behaviors. The references to her being ‘evil’ were solely from Ingrith saying she was evil, which means the subtitle “Mistress of Evil” is only marginally less stupid and irrelevant than “Always Be My Maybe.”

To add to all of the above, the CGI was painfully obvious. While it wasn’t any less obvious in the first movie, enough of that one took place in the magical Moors, which meant that things that didn’t look right weren’t going to look right anyway, as Pokémon-esque critters never do. 
This movie seemed to have more scenes that took place in and around a regular human castle, which just looked obviously fake, like Disney couldn’t be asked to spend a few extra dollars rendering something that didn’t look like “Baby’s First Render.”

And the music was just bleh. I remember it being good enough to compliment the previous movie, but like everything else, they dropped the ball here.

Rønning also tried to cram in a “love that isn’t romantic” angle for this one, as Maleficent had to learn to let go of Aurora and let her live her own life. But, like everything else he tried in this movie, his version paled in comparison to what Stromberg did the first time around.

I was actually excited to see this, and Disney really let me down.
If this was purely a stand-alone movie, it would have gotten a 2-Claw rating. Maybe a 3-Claw if I was feeling particularly generous.
But, because Disney got greedy and Rønning tried to retconn something that didn’t need fixing, it earned itself a solid 1-Claw for being bland and entirely unnecessary without actually developing any character in any meaningful direction.

For context, here is my review of “Maleficent” (2014)