On “Cruella”
(spoilers ahead)
Cruella is not a particuarly bad movie or anything, it just feels so unneccessary and ultimately pointless. The outfits are STUNNING-
-but the problem is, the original Cruella De Vil is just a flat-out irredeemable woman. She’s a nasty rich bitch with no compassion for any living thing. She’s a vampire bat and inhuman beast who ought to be locked up and never released, one could say. And this film tries so hard to make her sympathetic but why? We know the story, we know that a few years after the credits roll the woman formerly known as “Estella” will be skinning puppies and abusing her only friends. The fact that she has an evil mother who killed her adopted mother with a Dalmatian (no really) doesn’t exactly excuse her, you know?
So basically Cruella the movie had to scramble around to find another irredeemable woman to blame and that’s Emma Thompson’s character, the Baroness, Cruella’s unfathomably evil biological mum. The Baroness is obsessed with fashion, mistreats her underlings, is rich enough to never face consequences and would definitely skin 101 puppies to make a fur coat. In other words… she’s Cruella De Vil.
So I keep wondering, why couldn’t they just have run with that? Cast Thompson as Cruella… and have Stone be Estella/Cruella Jr, her daughter. Because you’d barely have to change a single thing in the script, a few names and that’s it! Estella could go through the exact same journey, have the exact same fear of turning out like her mother. Then she can get a true happy ending, no dog-murdering in her future, while Cruella Snr gets punished for her assassination-via-Dalmatian ways. You could even have the fun of not revealing in the marketing who Emma Thompson is really playing and wait for the reaction when it turns out Cruella is a sequel, not a prequel to 101 Dalmatians!
Anyway Disney no longer return my calls.
June 3, 2021 @ 10:53 am
I liked the film, especially the sound-track and the pulsating energy between the two Emmas – plus I rather liked Horace and Jasper! However I couldn’t help but feel that the change from Estella to Cruella was very abrupt, even bearing in mind Cruella’s… shall we say genes?
It was quite intense, especially for Disney. I kinda felt it would work better as a stand-alone story, rather than a tie-in to 101 Dalmatians. I also wonder if it would be better served as a ‘reboot’ rather than prequel.
June 3, 2021 @ 8:09 pm
Agreed on all counts, yeah! Honestly I think marketing the film as a prequel wasn’t a great idea to begin with, because it gave rise to all those “what, did a Dalmatian kill her family?” jokes (…which… turned out to be accurate). Really good soundtrack and spectacular visuals though.