Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Starring: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Mark Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Joel Fry, Emily Beecham
If you've ever wondered how Cruella DeVil became the Dalmatian-hating villain, then the bloated Cruella is for you. The trouble with origin stories is that most times we don't need to know them. However, sometimes they are well-made and meaningful, like Joker (2019), but in most cases we learn things about the character we never realized we didn't care about. Cruella looks great and has a fun soundtrack, but the rest of the movie is enveloped in gloom and sadness.
Cruella begins as Estella, a young girl with half-black, half-white hair symbolizing her internal struggle to be either good or evil. Good triumphs for a while, until her mother (Beecham) dies after being pushed over a cliff by fashion mogul Baroness (Thompson), or actually Baroness' Dalmatians, but no matter. Now an orphan, Estella falls in with two petty thieves (Fry and Hauser) and they become a makeshift family. Years later, Estella longs to be a fashion designer and falls in with Baroness as her top designer. Baroness is the disdainful maliciousness Cruella could only dream of being on her best day. Even when Cruella decides to forego her good side and embrace her wickedness, she is still doing a pale imitation of Baroness. Emma Thompson has a ball here.
The camera loves Emma Stone and she does what she can with a character who doesn't know whether she wants to be a hero or a villain. She's stuck in the middle and Cruella never figures out the answer. Who is Cruella? She is either cruel to her loyal underlings in one scene and then calling them family in the next. As Cruella finally rolls the end credits after over two hours, we are not able to make the leap from that Cruella to the one who wants to make coats out of dogs. Since a second Cruella is in the works, it appears we may get our answer if we were interested. The question is: Are we?
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