Label: Buena Vista Home Entertainment
MSRP: $36.99
Release Date: November 4, 2014
Region A
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Film: C+ / Video: B+ / Audio: B+ / Extras: C

The high point of the new film Maleficent comes roughly 30 minutes in, as Angelina Jolie reenacts one of the more iconic scenes from Disney’s animated Sleeping Beauty. Her wronged fairy bestows a terrible curse on Aurora, the newborn daughter of the ambitious King Stefan, portending that the child will, by her 16th birthday, prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. (Well, in this one, it’s “fall into a sleep-like death,” because “die” is perhaps too…direct? Too clear?) The dialogue is almost verbatim from the 1959 film, and it’s a rare occasion for Jolie to be as deliciously wicked as one would hope. Unfortunately, the film surrounding this scene—coincidentally the only one that so obviously quotes Sleeping Beautyˆ—remains turgid and sluggish on a repeat viewing. Jolie is predictably quite good as the so-called Mistress of All Evil, but very little else in this picture is.

While some of the beats from Sleeping Beauty are present—Aurora grows up in the woods watched over by a trio of bickering fairies, she meets a young prince when she’s just about to turn 16, and a dragon factors heavily into the finale—many have been twisted around, and few to good end. The major subversion of the story is that the teenage Aurora (Elle Fanning, whose talent far exceeds her underwritten and bland character) meets Maleficent well before she meets the sharp end of a spinning wheel, and their relationship is less contentious than expected. It’s a novel idea that never rises past the conceptual level, in part because the finished product feels awfully truncated at 97 minutes. (Fanning doesn’t even show up until just about halfway through, let alone meet Jolie’s antiheroine.) The other twists on the familiar, such as how Maleficent’s trusty raven is employed as a shapeshifter of all kinds, mostly serve as a way to mute the villainy with which we associate the character.

This is, in essence, the problem with Maleficent: our history with the eponymous character. Anyone who’s seen Sleeping Beauty knows the terror that she represents; that terror is absent aside from the aforementioned curse sequence. Maleficent takes down the king and his men, but does so righteously, to the point where she’s not even really a mix of hero and villain, as much as a slightly grumpy hero who makes one rash decision that nearly haunts her for her entire life. It’s perhaps not surprising that Disney, in bastardizing its own fairy tale adaptation, has diluted any true darkness from someone who once threatened to bring the power of Hell to destroy a handsome prince. But that doesn’t make this film any less of a letdown.

A/V

On one hand, the Maleficent Blu-ray sports a predictably solid audio and video transfer. On the other hand, Maleficent is not a terribly nice movie to look at, story and character issues aside. Robert Stromberg, the film’s director, previously worked on Disney’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland, which features some extraordinarily ugly, dingy-looking, and purely unpleasant special effects. This film’s not quite so bad, but some of the effects look even more out of place and green-screen-heavy on an HDTV than they did in a movie theater. So while the transfer, specifically of the video element, is quite successful, that only heightens the grim and gray CGI mishmash of this world.

Extras

If Maleficent is indeed drastically shorter in its theatrical cut, you wouldn’t be able to tell from the special features of this Blu-ray. There are a handful of deleted scenes, but the only substantial one features Sharlto Copley as the young Stefan, testing out what a king’s crown would look like on his head. (Remember Sharlto Copley? Remember how good we thought he was in District 9? Boy, what a mistake that was.) Aside from the deleted scenes, there’s a smattering of behind-the scenes supplements, from a 90-second look at the costume design of Maleficent herself to an 8-minute walk through a first-act action sequence. What’s most interesting is the absence of Stromberg from these featurettes; Jolie, Fanning and Sam Riley show up to represent the actors, and there’s screenwriter Linda Woolverton and producer Joe Roth behind the camera. But Stromberg’s not even given a talking-head interview for a few seconds, which is interesting, if inexplicable. All it does is raise more questions than the bland supplements intend on exploring.

Overall

Maleficent is a fine showcase for its lead, Angelina Jolie, but the special effects, intended to be daring and epic and scope, are lackluster and colorless. What’s more, this Blu-ray’s supplemental section is unfortunately light and mostly insight-free.