Into the Woods (2014)

Directed by Rob Marshall. Starring James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep, Lilla Crawford, Daniel Huttlestone, Chris Pine, Mackenzie Mauzy, Billy Magnussen, Tammy Blanchard, Lucy Punch, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Richard Glover, Johnny Depp. [PG]

Overproduced screen version of Stephen Sondheim’s “fractured fairy-tale” musical is a clomping mess, to be sure, and almost too fundamentally flawed to be rescued—I can’t say how well it works as a stage show, but the unsound storytelling structure fails as a single movie since it feels like an abridged fantasy adventure and its glumly revisionist sequel have been smashed together into a single blob. The point, I suppose, is to turn convention on its head by throwing together several classic fairy tales (“Cinderella”, “Rapunzel”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, etc.) into the same churning cauldron, and once everything appears to be resolved, that’s when the movie keeps going for another forty-five minutes or so to demonstrate how “happily ever after” is a crock, there are consequences for these actions, darn it, and why not throw in some half-assed existential dread while we’re at it? The way these individual stories are “packaged” together doesn’t invite cooperation (the characters and their quests are often islands unto themselves until their crashing intersections), and such erratic yarn-spinning and goal-striving makes the thick, moody atmosphere become phony when burdened by too much attention—the eyes turn restless when the mind and heart aren’t being engaged. The cast can’t save it, either, despite a number of heavy hitters: Streep hams it up to little avail as a witch, Kendrick and Blunt are fetching but get smothered by the production, Corden is haplessly out of his league, Depp’s appearance as the Big Bad Wolf is a self-conscious distraction even by extended walk-on expectations, and didn’t Punch already play the exact same evil stepsister role in Ella Enchanted? Fans of the Broadway show may have more insight and fondness for the material, but I found this cinematic adaptation to be almost entirely disenchanting.

39/100