Seeing her inhabit the role with wide-eyed wonder, and gloriously belt out songs like “Part of Your World,” underscores that the producers chose wisely, which extends across the board to Melissa McCarthy as the evil Ursula, who leverages Ariel’s longing in her thirst for power and Javier Bardem, who somehow manages to rock a crown and trident as King Triton. When the movie was announced, it was difficult to fathom the unhinged reaction from the dankest quadrants of social media and the racism from trolls in response to Bailey’s casting. ![]() Working with writer David Magee and producer/Broadway standout Lin-Manuel Miranda (who has contributed new lyrics to augment Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s classics), director Rob Marshall (whose musical credentials include “Chicago” and “Into the Woods”) answers that by fleshing out not just Bailey’s Ariel but the object of her affection, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), who gets a new ballad and more backstory. While that has produced a mixed bag of live-action adaptations, “The Little Mermaid” happily falls more toward the “Beauty and the Beast” end of the gene pool than, say, “Dumbo” or the recent Disney+ misfire “Pinocchio.”Īt first blush, theater-goers might wonder why this retelling would pad roughly 50 minutes onto the length of the animated hit, probably remembering more about its colorful songs than its love-at-first-sight story. Older kids might be jaded about the prospect of heading under the sea again, but parents and younger ones should find a lot to like in the studio’s latest exercise in leaving no intellectual property unexploited. ![]() Thanks largely to star Halle Bailey, the lavish musical holds up nicely under the weight of those expectations, preserving the original’s essence while updating undernourished aspects of it and riding a warm, hard-to-resist wave of nostalgia. ![]() As the movie that began Disney’s animation renaissance in 1989, a live-action “The Little Mermaid” comes with big fins to fill.
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