The Little Mermaid movie review: All singing, not much dancing, never ending

The Little Mermaid.

Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie don’t love life under the sea.

SHE SAW

Halle Bailey is the perfect Ariel. I won’t hear a bad word said about her or her performance but Disney’s remake of The Little Mermaid wasn’t the film I had hoped it would be. It’s too long, too adult for young children and too juvenile for adults. We took our three kids: the youngest, 6, complained relentlessly throughout that he was bored and hungry; the eldest, 9, was terrified of the interminable shipwreck scene - among others - and begged to leave; the middle child, 7, intermittently grabbed my hand in fear but was somewhat content - realistically she was forgotten about because she wasn’t causing a scene. She’ll probably need to take that up with her therapist later in life.

There’s been a lot of chatter about this film over the last four years since the casting of Bailey was announced, including the unimaginative backlash that argued mythical mermaids shouldn’t be black. The original animated film is iconic for a generation of 90s children - it almost always had the “Sorry, I’m out” card inside its plastic sleeve at Videon, Dominion Rd - and now those people want to pass on their love to their own kids but I’m not convinced this version is going to do that.

The soundtrack to The Little Mermaid remains one of Disney’s best. Part of Your World is one of life’s great shower power ballads and Bailey does a formidable job with it, adding some soulful runs that I’ll no doubt butcher this week while soaping up. I don’t know if the addition of new music by Lin-Manuel Miranda was necessary - this film is outrageously 52 minutes longer than the original - but Scuttlebutt, performed by Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs, is a bonafide jam and my kids have been playing it a lot, so there’s redemption in that.

Updating the story for our times, the film leans into the idea that the love story between Ariel and Eric is about bridging two worlds that are divided not just geographically but by misguided hatred for each other. I wonder what that could be an allegory for in the 2020s?

There’s a notable lack of dancing in this film and I wonder whether that’s partly responsible for it not feeling very energetic or rousing. The dancing in Under the Sea is performed by computer-generated sea creatures that doesn’t have the same impact as human physical revelry. It feels like they really missed a trick with the final happy ending by not having some knockout synchronised swimming by the merpeople and ecstatic sand stomping by the humans on shore. Put me in, Coach, I have some ideas.

HE SAW

When I asked our 6-year-old for his thoughts on the movie, he described it in three words: “Horrible, terrible, awful.” I wasn’t surprised and had only really asked out of politeness, having already learned of his feelings through his words and actions over the preceding two hours and 15 minutes. He spent the first few minutes with his head buried in my chest in terror and much of the remaining eternity complaining about being bored. More than once I found him on the floor of the cinema, eating popcorn, which I hoped had at least come from his own cup.

I couldn’t blame him for the negativity of his take. There were points in the movie, particularly during the interminable second half, that I felt like getting down there on the floor with him. I haven’t seen the original 1989 version of the movie, having just aged out of the target demo at the time, so this new version carried no nostalgia value for me and without that, and with the knowledge that my children were not only not into it, but were actively hating it, there was very little left in it for me.

I did like some of the songs, particularly two of the new songs co-written by Lin-Manuel Miranda – The Scuttlebutt and Wild Uncharted Waters – but otherwise my experience of the movie, particularly towards the end, felt most akin to being dragged through the ocean in a driftnet, with no hope of ever getting out. At 135 minutes it is too long for most adult movies, let alone something parents might cruelly force their kids to sit through.

As we raced toward the conclusion in which the mermaid Ariel would forever abandon her family, home and everything she knew for some guy she’d known for about five minutes, I found my mind beginning to wander. At one stage, quite early on, I started to think about how terrifying it would be to live under the sea, constantly in fear of being eaten by a shark. But as the movie passed the two-hour mark, my interest having long since waned, my son whining in my ear, I realised that image was starting to feel a lot less like a nightmare and a lot more like a fantasy.

The Little Mermaid is in cinemas now.