Mulan (2020) **

Source: Imdb

I was looking forward to this re-make of a beloved Disney classic, but I was sorely disappointed with this hollow, soulless rehash that failed to engage me. The movie doesn’t start out very promising, with an utterly ridiculous sequence of a young Mulan chasing a chicken. Dominated by bad CGI, a comic-book look and inane dialogue, the scene unfortunately sets the tone for the entire film. Overall, the whole project seemed quite tone-deaf culturally and from a feminist perspective. Any attempt at humour felt forced and fell utterly flat.

The casting was questionable as most actors just weren’t very good. Also, Mulan’s parents are positively ancient. They could be her grandparents. Though lead Yifei Liu must be complimented for performing her own stunts, she lacked any depth or subtlety in her performance. As with “The Last Airbender”, casting an actor who is a proficient martial artist isn’t everything. To be fair, though, the terrible script didn’t help at all, setting out cringy, cryptic, boring and sometimes plain gibberish dialogue and introducing unnecessary elements such as the witch, a completely superfluous plot addition that took up quite a lot of screen time while adding absolutely no value. She didn’t make any sense as a character. Talking of elements that didn’t add up, Mulan’s decision to completely unnecessarily and intentionally blow her cover, or the sudden inexplicable loyalty of the general were other twists that stood out like sore thumbs. Maybe it is the editors’ fault, but the flow of the story is just impaired by illogical turns like that. One detail that annoyed me personally was that the script left out the iconic hair-cutting scene – another gaffe I find hard to overlook as the reasoning behind this decision does not appear to serve the project. In general, I found it hard to get behind Mulan as a heroin because her character was just so ill-defined. This rendition provoked none of the engagement and held nothing of the tension of the original. To be honest, I can see why, on top of everything, they chose to forgo the romance, but in this instance, I would have welcomed it just to provide some plot goal I could truly subscribe to, cliché as it might have been.

On another note, they were clearly aiming for visual opulence, but ended up with ridiculousness. The colour palette was much too bright and cartoonish. There was terribly obvious CGI and wire work everywhere. It all seemed jarring instead of beautiful. To top it off, Harry Gregson-Williams delivered his weakest work yet with this score.

All in all, 2/5 because this didn’t outright bore me, but really, it’s not a very good film. I much prefer the classic.

Mulan on Imdb