Kenny Ortega’s made-for-television musical sends the villains’ children to a fairy-tale prep school, and it is bright, tuneful and thin. The young cast are game, the songs are catchy, and Kristin Chenoweth walks off with the whole thing in one number.
Kenny Ortega, who directed High School Musical (2006), has been handed the whole Disney back catalogue and told to make a school out of it. The premise is a good one for a merchandising department and not a bad one for a film: the heroes of every fairy tale have locked their villains on an island, and the young king-to-be decides their children deserve a chance at the nice school on the mainland. Descendants was made for television, runs 112 minutes and carries a PG. It is bright, tuneful and thin, and the adults are better than the children. It is worth an evening if there is a ten-year-old in the house, and worth one number if there is not.
That number belongs to Kristin Chenoweth. Her Maleficent is a suburban mother disappointed in her daughter, all trilled vowels and menace thrown away over her shoulder, and when she gets “Evil Like Me” she treats the scene as if it were the only one that mattered. It is. The song is a proper villain’s number, sung with the diction of someone who has done this on a stage, and it is the one stretch of the film where the camera holds still and lets a performer work. We laughed out loud at her, more than once, and we were sorry when she left.
The look of the thing is better than a television budget has any right to be. Mark Hofeling builds the Isle of the Lost as a heap of scaffolding, washing lines and corrugated iron under a grey sky, and Auradon Prep as lawns, turrets and a statue of the king out front. Thomas Burstyn lights the island in a dirty green and the school in flat, even sunshine, so that the four newcomers look wrong in it the moment they step out of the limousine. Kara Saun’s costumes do most of the storytelling: Mal in purple leather and zips, Evie in blue, Carlos in red and white, Jay in torn brown, all of it set against blazers and pastels that have never seen a stain.
The young cast are game. Dove Cameron carries the lead on a sceptical eyebrow and a habit of looking at kindness as if it might bite. Cameron Boyce is loose and funny as Carlos, whose mother taught him to fear dogs, and Booboo Stewart’s Jay cannot walk past a table without pocketing something on it, a joke the film repeats and which keeps working. Sofia Carson plays Evie as a girl raised to catch a prince and not encouraged to want anything else, and she finds more in it than the script gives her. The opening number, “Rotten to the Core”, is Ortega doing what he does: a lot of bodies, a lot of angles, a chorus you can sing by the second time round.
The script, by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, says every lesson out loud and then says it again. A Remedial Goodness class is a good joke the first time and a tired one by the third. Mitchell Hope’s Ben is pleasant, well-meaning and about as interesting as his blazer, and the film asks us to care about him anyway. Around the hour mark there is a match of an invented sport called tourney, and we found ourselves checking how long was left, which is not something a 112-minute film should make an adult do. The singing voices and the mouths do not always meet, and Don Brochu’s editing, clean in the numbers, lets the middle stretch drift.
Against Ortega’s own record this is a step down from High School Musical, which had one simple story and told it, and a step up from most of what the channel has made since. David Nessim Lawrence’s score is agreeable and forgettable between the songs; the songs are not. The film’s idea, that children are not their parents and get to decide for themselves, is stated plainly and often, and the audience it is for will not mind hearing it twice. Grown-ups will get Chenoweth, four good costumes and a nap.
