 If you loved the live action Mulan, if you couldn't get enough of that Lion King remake, what about Will Smith's Genie in Aladdin? Do that do anything for you? How about the retelling of Cinderella? Or maybe the two Maleficent films were right up your alley. Johnny Depp-Bann, Alice in Wonderland 1 and 2 have your number. If you liked pretty much all the movies I listed off, you're gonna love Cruella. If, however, you are like myself, you should probably go ahead and pass on this one. Hey, people love 101 Dalmatians. It's a Disney staple. It's a classic. Which is why people were begging for a live action movie. Which is exactly what they did in the 90s with Glenn Close. And then again in the 90s with Glenn Close for 102 Dalmatians. That's right, there was a second one. People seem to forget these movies exist. But that wasn't enough for Disney. They wanted to go for broke and do another version, this time a prequel of sorts, showing the rise of Cruella. What makes her tick? What gets under her skin? Why did she become the way she is? How did she get the last name to Will? Disney's got answers for all of that and more. Almost two and a half hours more as a matter of fact. This is going to be a spoiler-free cautionary tale to most of you. I went ahead and ponied up $30 on Disney Plus because I'm an absolute buffoon. For me, my wife and two kids to watch. We did the numbers. It's cheaper to watch it at home for four of us. And I wasn't going to see that by myself. Really though, the wife and kids I could care less about. I do this for you. You know, I slip my wrist for you guys. I gotta get these reviews out. You know, people really want to know, hey, what does that middle-aged man from Minnesota think about the live action Cruella film? I really need to know his thoughts on that. Well, here they are. First off, it's 45 minutes too long. All these movies thinking they have to be epic lengths need to stop. You're not worth it. An hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes, that's a perfect run length for a movie like this. And this is operating under the understanding that this didn't need to exist at all, but it does, so we're going to review what we've been given. Secondly, did I do a first? Did I do a first of all when I started? It doesn't matter. Emma Stone is a national treasure. I love her. I love her here. She's always great. The fine jaw playing Cruella. She has that nasty accent. She's having fun. She's hamming it up. She's the best part of the film by far. More importantly, if you're a fan of Devil Wears Prada, you might find something to enjoy for some of this. This film contains a dash of origin story and a sprinkling of heist film blended together into a nice Devil Wears Prada ripoff. It kind of reminded me a little bit of the Star Wars solo film in the fact that it didn't need to happen. I didn't have any desire to watch it, but I did. And when it was all said and done, I look back and think, everything kind of worked, you know. It visually looked nice. The music was good. The acting was fine. I just didn't care. And it was long. And why was it so freaking long? Cut that crap down. The movie has multiple final acts where you think it's over, but then they just go into an entire other sequence and I'm just thinking, wait, we should have stopped this a while ago. There's a good chunk of time focused on Cruella when she's a little child that I didn't really ask for or need to see. That goes for probably 20 minutes. Visually, the movie's pretty good for the most part, but there are these night scenes that are just ugly. They're hard to see. There's a mishmash of weird CG dogs going on and the clouds in the background. Everything is just so fake and artificial looking. No, they go and they go back to that later too, that ugly outside effect. But for the most part, it does look nice. If you go into this, judging it off the trailers, no. This is not Disney's version of Joker. It's not dark and twisted and really getting into the psyche of Cruella. It's still very much a family-friendly Disney film. There's nothing really scary in it. I guess the three Dalmatians that are CG kind of growl a little bit and bark. There's no blood. There's no swearing. It's very much something your kids can watch. Since I'm clearly just a jaded cynic who's been weathered by many years of bad films, I'm not the one that you should probably listen to. My wife thought it was boring. She didn't like it. My nine-year-old son thought it was pretty good. And my 12-year-old daughter, who I would imagine is a big target audience for this type of film, really liked it. So a random nine-year-old and 12-year-old liked the film. You can do with that information as you will. Besides being over-long and not particularly very interesting outside of a good performance by Stone, who always puts in a good performance so she could have wasted her time doing a much better movie instead of this. I think it's probably presumed that this is going to lead into the cartoon, the original movie. That's a fair thing to presume. It was also a worry by many, including myself, that they were going to try to humanize Cruella. Make her out to be an anti-hero or someone you can relate with. And they pretty much do exactly that. You kind of like her at the end and feel for her, but then we're supposed to transition to the crazy, maniacal, psychotic Cruella Deville from the cartoon one. The transition's not there. It's not even remotely seamless. None of the seams are there. The stitches are all ripped off. The staples are gone. Unless they're planning on making more of these live-action ones to kind of thread the needle or just completely, you know, make their... Why am I doing all these weird fabric sewing metaphors? If they're trying to do their own thing, fine. Fair play. But they're clearly baking off nostalgia at the end of this film, and it's not a good bank. It's a brick. It's a basketball term for when you don't make the shot. I think. Sports. I'm just trying to get away from the sewing metaphors, okay? People in the comments have been talking. There's been whispers here and there saying, Adam, booby, you gotta put a ranking system on your movie reviews. And so here we are. Because I love ranking systems so much, and I think they're incredibly valuable. I'm gonna go ahead and throw a rating of 60 out of 101 Dalmatian puppy bones on this film. The bones of the puppies. Yeah, that's the rating on this episode. Well, there you have it. Disney's Cruella. I can't wait for whatever they cook up next. Disney's Ursula or Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame priest bad guy or Disney's the evil bear from Brave or Disney's Gaston. You know, like, oh god, it's not gonna end. Well, that's the review. I'd love to know what you thought in the comments below. Like the video if you had a good time. Subscribe. That's an opportunity you can make for yourself. And hit that notification bell so that you get this jammed right into your feed in real time. It's very helpful, I've been told. I'm also on Patreon at Patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies. Really, really would love to support there. There's some good people doing good things. And I have an exclusive show called The Cringe that's only for Patreons. And YouTube join members. Oh my god, I'm off the rails. I'm off the rails.