Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Descendants: The Rise of Red’ on Disney+, the Latest Incarnation Of The Disney Princesses Extended Universe

The DPEU (Disney Princess Extended Universe, of course) chunders on with Descendants: The Rise of Red (now streaming on Disney+), the latest film in one of Disney’s countless, eternal sub-franchises. This series – now consisting of four films, an animated series, several soundtracks, a stack of novels, etc. – is about the offspring of classic Disney villains, and how they sing and dance all the time while solving easily solvable problems in convoluted ways. And this particular new film is a rebooty spinoffish endeavor that maintains the usual song and dance while introducing new characters and depositing them into a time-travel plot. Fans are surely rejoicing at the return of this colorful tweener content, but will you give a dang if you haven’t already consumed all the preexisting consumables Disney has plopped forth during the last decade? Doubtful.

DESCENDANTS: THE RISE OF RED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Uma (China Anne McClain), daughter of Ursula, is the new honcho at Auradon Prep, the exclusive private school for the kids of Disney characters. She wants to change things around this dump, so she sends an invitation to the previously verboten land of Wonderland, where teenager Red (Kylie Cantrall) exists under the oppressive iron thumb of her mother, the Queen of Hearts (Rita Ora). The Queen doesn’t like to play political ball with the rest of the nation-states in the realm of Auradon, so it’s quite a shock when they get an invite to the reindeer games. And Red – well, she doesn’t like that her mother is mean and evil, so she ideologically rebels by breaking all her mom’s cruel rulez! She sings a song that laments her destiny, which inevitably involves sitting on her mother’s throne someday, and also rhymes “red red red red red” with “off with her head.” It doesn’t seem to occur to Red that taking over means making Wonderland a nice place instead of one with a very strict curfew and things like that. She hangs out with her tutor, Maddox Hatter (Leonardo Nam) – son of Uncle Remus from Song of the South, I think – who introduces to the plot a time machine, but then takes it away like, there’s no way this thing is going to be used, it’s too damn dangerous! So it’s best to just forget about it forever.

Now we meet Chloe Charming (Malia Baker), daughter of Cinderella (Brandy) and Prince Charming (Paolo Montalban), who’s actually King Charming now, which, logic dictates, renders Cinderella as Queen Charming and Chloe as Princess Charming. That’s how math works, bro! Somehow, Chloe doesn’t sing a song that rhymes “blue blue blue blue blue” with, like, “beef stew,” or something, as she preps to go to Auradon Prep. Once our protags arrive at the school, we learn that Cinderella and the Queen of Hearts have a longstanding beef dating back to their time at Auradon Prep. The Queen of Hearts is still very very bitter about being the object of a Cinderella-led prank – which has inspired Queenie to take over the entire school mu-hahahahahahahahah! 

This crap shall not stand, of course, so Red pulls out the time machine and warps her and Chloe way far back into the ancient past to like, 2003 or something probably. And there they find out that Young Cinderella (Morgan Dudley) and Young Queen of Hearts, then known as Bridget (Ruby Rose Turner), were total besties. Not only that, but Bridget was all pink and happy and singing songs about how nice she is and how she wants to spread all that niceness around. WHA HAPP’N’D? It seems the prank – which has something to do with a cookbook, of course – that hasn’t happened yet inspired Queen of Hearts to become a totally fascist poophead, so Chloe and Red pose as new students in order to stop the prank from happening and therefore forever alter the future and maybe even prevent themselves from being born (we’ve all seen Back to the Future, so we know how this junk works). But they don’t think about that, they just plow forward with their plan, all too aware that everything in the DPEU ends with a happily ever after whether you want it to or not.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Descendants and Monster High are basically the same series – the prep-school stuff brings to mind Harry Potter if everything was doused in primary colors and the plot occasionally ground to a halt for mediocre musical numbers – but with slightly different premises and streaming on competitive services. I daren’t determine which one is better and/or more annoying. The discourse is just way too thorny.

Performance Worth Watching: Fans will delight to see Brandy return to Descendants as Cinderella. She even gets a nice song to sing, because she’s quite good at singing songs!

Memorable Dialogue: The Queen of Hearts’ rather harsh mantra: “Love ain’t it!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s not revealed outright but the implication here is that the costumers, hairdressers, set designers and VFX artists were paid by the inch. All the better for the everythingness of Descendants to leap off the screen and make you feel like you’re right there in the midst of an exploding rainbow of outsized characters, lousy dialogue, watery hip-hop/pop-Broadway hooks, opportunities for spinoff products and, of course, the eternal furthering of the Disney brand. Taste the rainbow!, the movie says. TASTE IT. 

Descendants fans surely are used to all this OTT overkill, which exists very much within the Disney Channel formula of heavily processed visuals and forced pep: It is CHEERY and it is COLORFUL and you will FEEL GOOD or ELSE. Now HUM along to this song PLEASE. The shareholders DEMAND IT. Where was I? Right: The fans. Whether they’ll like the new characters, I’m not sure, but why wouldn’t they? They don’t seem to be too tonally or stylistically different from the old ones. Disney isn’t really into taking risks, remember. As for the prep-school premise (complete with silly instructors, scenes in alchemy labs and some lead-up to the big “Castlecoming” dance), it’s go-to tween fodder for writers who don’t want to spill too much brain sauce coming up with something fresh. 

I will say The Rise of Red boasts the type of shiny-happy messages that’ll make the world a perfect utopia if everyone watches it. If anything is to be gleaned from Bridget’s highly repetitive and frequently reprised refrain “life is sweeter when you are,” it’s that life is sweeter when you are. Sweet. Sweeter. When you are sweet. Er. In other words, be nice, ya chuckleheads. Also, don’t prank people. It sucks for the prankee. And if all else fails, travel back in time and change things. Now that’s some helpful advice.

Our Call: Allow me to preclude this recommendation with an obvious statement: NOOBS NEED NOT APPLY. Fans of this franchise will want to STREAM IT once, and it probably won’t clock the numbers of its predecessors (diminishing returns is always the trend for these things, especially when introducing new variations on old stuff), but it’s surely just good enough for all interested and engaged parties. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.