Disenchanted Can’t Conjure the Magic of the Original

Photo: Disney

At first, it might seem strange that the sequel to Enchanted, one of the more charming, critically embraced live-action Disney films of the modern era, isn’t getting a theatrical release. Then you watch Disenchanted, the sequel in question that is now streaming on Disney+, and you understand completely.

Despite the presence of original stars Amy Adams, reprising her role as Giselle, the former princess-to-be of Andalasia, and Patrick Dempsey, her princely New York City husband, this follow-up is devoid of real magic and, in the years before streaming existed, absolutely would have been one of those Disney sequels that went straight to video. This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.

The original Enchanted, released in 2007, was a clever send-up of Disney-princess fare that doubled as a charming fairy tale in its own right. Even those who find Mouse House musicals too treacly and sentimental were won over by its more subversive moments, like “Happy Little Working Song,” a Snow White/Cinderella satire in which Giselle cleans a Manhattan apartment with help from the creatures of NYC: Rats, pigeons, and a typhoon of buzzing flies. Sadly, Disenchanted miscalculates its place in the Disney musical Venn diagram where soaring and satirical overlap, despite featuring songs composed once again by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.

Disenchanted takes place ten years after the original and begins with the now-married Giselle and Robert (Dempsey) deciding to move their family from New York City to the suburbs. That family now includes Sophia (twins Mila and Lara Jackson), the baby girl Giselle and Robert had together, and Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino), Robert’s teenage daughter from his first marriage and Giselle’s stepdaughter. Life in Monroeville, New York, is a drag for Morgan, who resents Giselle for making her leave the city and sees herself as an afterthought, especially when Andalasia’s King Edward (James Marsden) and Queen Nancy (Idina Menzel) arrive via portal (just go with it) to present their goddaughter Sophia, a “true” child of Andalasia, with a magic wishing wand and scroll.

Faster than you can ask, “Wait, what makes a magic wishing wand different from a regular magic wand?” Giselle inadvertently invokes its powers and turns Monroeville into Monrolasia, a fairy tale–esque land where the queen bee of the community (Maya Rudolph’s Malvina Monroe) is an actual domineering queen, flanked by two stepsister-style sidekicks in the form of Yvette Nicole Brown and Jayma Mays; Morgan is now a young, happy princess; Robert becomes a very confused prince; and Giselle morphs into half her sweet, soprano self and half evil stepmother determined to seize power from Malvina. It’s obvious that this semi-bizarro version of Andalasia is actually terrible and that something must be done to turn things back to the way they were.

Clearly the idea here is to take the Disney-princess-as-fish-out-of-water-in-Manhattan premise of the first movie and mold it into a multiple-fish-out-of-water-in-a-fairy-tale setting, but that’s pretty much where the film’s sense of imagination ends. Adams does her level best to re-summon the sunny optimism of Giselle, but with the material she’s been given by screenwriter Brigitte Hales, an alum of ABC’s Once Upon a Time, she can only do so much. Casting Rudolph as a Disney villain should have provided her with a full plate of red meat to tear into, but all she gets is a few morsels of a Beyond burger. Most of her performance in this is reduced to intense glaring, which she is very good at, to be fair. But she deserved more.

Honestly, the one actor in this cast who seems to be having fun and actually elicited some laughs out of me is Marsden, who makes Edward’s regal buffoon just as much fun as he was in Enchanted. (“Ah! Thank you, peasant,” he says confidently while handing his sword to a contractor working on Giselle and Robert’s house.) Unfortunately, he gets less screen time this go-round.

Everything in Disenchanted is lesser than, from the CGI characters — an animated scroll voiced by Alan Tudyk looks way too much like the Microsoft Office Assistant paper clip — to the musical numbers, which are staged competently by director Alan Shankman, who knows his way around musical theater, but also come across as a bit rote, like the work of someone who understood the assignment and did the assignment but made zero effort to earn extra credit.

The songs have that same quality. “I’ve got a feeling that maybe today / Just ’round that corner or out by the bay / Some kind of change could be coming my way,” sings Baldachinno as Morgan. She sounds lovely, but nothing about the lyrics she’s crooning matches the wry, self-aware quality that made the music in Enchanted such a delight. These songs, like so much in Disenchanted, aren’t mocking Disney tunes so much as melodically touching on all the tropes in Disney movies. But simply acknowledging those tropes isn’t the same as lightheartedly mocking them, which is what Enchanted did so brilliantly. If Disney really wanted to make an Enchanted sequel in the spirit of the original, it should have commissioned a screenplay that addresses Hollywood’s obsession with recycling well-known stories that will help keep their streaming platforms afloat. That’s a version of Disenchanted I would have liked to see. I might have even been willing to pay money to see something like that in an actual theater.