Review: Disney’s New Mulan Is a Dull Reflection of the Original - Vanity Fair

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The live-action film turns a treasured animated epic into a plodding bore.

September 3, 2020

Long ago, in the ancient year of 1998, Disney tried something tricky: an animated princess musical that was also an action movie, with big fight scenes no doubt aimed at appealing to little boys who may have balked at another Beauty and the Beast or Little Mermaid. (For such balking was encouraged in boys more back then than it is now, though it is still plenty encouraged.) In making Mulan—based on the Chinese legend of warrior woman Hua Mulan, who fights for the emperor’s army in her father’s stead, disguised as a man—also continued a half-hearted project of diversity, adding more global shape to its princess canon. It was, at the time, a big deal.

The film, directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft, earned that bigness in enough places. There was the powerhouse ballad “Reflection,” sung by Lea Salonga in the film but rerecorded by Christina Aguilera, the belter’s first single and still one of her most enduring songs. And there was an eye-popping mountain battle scene, aided by ever more confident computer animation, in which an invading horde of Huns is subsumed by an avalanche. It’s stunning stuff, still now, even though much of the rest of the hand-drawn animation looks so sadly quaint from the vantage point of the digital age.

Having affirmed its place in the firmament of animated classics, Mulan could have enjoyed a nice retirement. But Disney as it exists now is not content to let things rest, and so—after tackling live-action remakes of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Alice in Wonderland—they turned their necromancy to Mulan. Only, certain mores and cultural interests have changed in the last 22 years, meaning Disney didn’t feel quite comfortable simply literalizing the 1998 film, talking dragon and musical numbers and all. Instead, they wanted a big action epic in the style of many huge movies that have come out of the Chinese film industry, only directed by a New Zealander, Niki Caro.

Caro directed the lovely New Zealand coming-of-age tale Whale Rider, which earned its young star, Keisha Castle-Hughes, an Oscar nomination for best actress. In that way, she was a fine pick for Mulan, another coming-of-age story about a headstrong young woman bucking the rigid gender norms of her place and time. In other ways—being that Caro is not from China or of Chinese descent—her hiring rang alarm bells. Disney had to proceed carefully, not wanting to tarnish valuable I.P. or create a cultural blowback that would put its corporate progressiveness under the microscope.

What has resulted from all that needle threading is a movie, out on Disney+ on September 4, that’s been managed to death. The new Mulan is a sweeping action movie with lots of cool fight choreography, and yet it never musters up a sense of awe. Even the loathsome Beauty and the Beast remake was not this bland and perfunctory; that film at least had the darkly electrifying jolt of its awfulness. Mulan is not awful. It’s just inert, a lifeless bit of product that will probably neither satisfy die-hards nor enrapture an entire new generation of fans.

Without the songs and silliness of the 1998 original, 2020’s Mulan throws itself into comparison not with other children’s classics, but with hundreds of other sword-and-sandal films that have all pretty much done what Mulan does before. Caro, filming in New Zealand and China, finds some stunning backdrops. The costumes look great. The martial arts sequences nicely approximate the fluid, floating grace of wuxia films. But somehow Mulan’s assets don’t coalesce into a thrilling whole. It’s certainly significant that there is a big Disney film with a Chinese actor, Liu Yifei, as its star. But watching Mulan, one gets the sense that this triumph of representation was considered enough—like the job was done once casting was finished, and everything else was just mechanical detail. Mulan deserves better, as does Liu, as do eager audiences.

Beyond removing the songs and wisecracking dragon called Mushu (probably better he was left out of this one), the major change in this Mulan is the addition of a new villain character, a shape-shifting witch played by cinema icon Gong Li. The way Caro sets the film’s two determined, iconoclastic women in opposition to each other—both want to transcend the strictures of patriarchy, just in different ways—gives Mulan a brief charge of actual resonance. But the film does little with that spark, rushing to a climax that leaves this complicated dynamic mostly unexamined. Still, it is a pleasure as ever to watch Gong do her thing, slinking and thrashing around in a fabulous black witch’s cloak.

Would that some of that magic had been applied elsewhere. Mulan’s choppy script, from four credited writers, has no time for flights of fancy or emotional depth. Instead it hurries us through the basic beats of Mulan’s story, from humble village girl bound for arranged marriage to military hero of the empire, and, after some just-fine battle sequences, dumps us out at the end, gesturing heavily toward an impressiveness it never actually conjured. Though Liu holds her scenes well, we barely even know Mulan. She’s a mere cipher—an emblem with which a huge studio can pat itself on the back, proud to offer this lukewarm plate of inspirational content before moving on to the next whatever. Who is that girl I see, indeed.

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Review: Disney’s New Mulan Is a Dull Reflection of the Original - Vanity Fair

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