The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Disney’s newly independent princesses haven’t lost their taste for glitzy frocks just yet – but Helen Mirren leads a diverse cast revelling in a sense of syrupy fun

2343d ago

Clara (Mackenzie Foy) has recently lost her mother. Searching for a key to the music box her mother left her, she discovers the magical Four Realms where Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren) has declared war on Sugar Plum (Keira Knightley) and the rest. Only Clara and a nutcracker soldier called Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight) can bring peace.

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Disney’s holiday offering is icing without the cake.

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The ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who makes a brief appearance during the film and in the closing credits, is the highlight, gracefully unhindered by silly dialogue in two dance sequences.

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The Mouse King reinvents a holiday classic, minus the romance and much of the dance, resulting in a movie with little beneath its stunningly designed surface.

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Like a clockwork musical toy shaken to within an inch of its life

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This is your warning that if you have any affinity for the ballet, avoid this at all costs.

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Throughout the performance, backdrops raise around the ballerina (Misty Copeland), and the dancing is exemplary (of particular note are the dancers playing mice, who move in slinking, almost liquid, rolling motions that are punctuated by the jolts of angular limbs), with wild changes in lighting and animated flourishes—such as flowers that seem to bud within the stage floor—that mix the tactile with the impressionistic.

2343d ago

“The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is a weirdly hideous hodgepodge of images and ideas, as convoluted as its confusing title would suggest. It’s at once familiar and bizarre, overstuffed yet half-baked. And while it boasts impressive individual elements, the overall result remains far from the magic it seeks.

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Mackenzie Foy plays a teenager drawn into a magical parallel world where she encounters Keira Knightley as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Disney's new take on the classic holiday tale and beloved ballet.

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Too much eye-assaulting CG and not enough Misty Copeland are just two of the problems with this bloated, un-whimsical tale

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‘Nutcracker and the Four Realms’ destroys a classic story

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This wretched attempt to turn the famous fairy tale/ballet into a blockbuster gives a bad name to family entertainment

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But you can only expect so much from the Disney machine, and this narrative culls from the ballet and the original story by E.T.A. Hoffmann in that young Clara (Foy) is searching for a key to open what amounts to a Fabergé egg handed down to her from her late mother by the eye-patched Drosselmeyer (Freeman, seemingly working on a sort of charismatic absent-minded professor cue).

2343d ago