The Disney+
Christmas comedy’s winning conceit – a revisionist fairy godmother dropped in Boston – buckles under the weight of formulaic earnestness
Godmothered, a Disney+ live-action refocus on the understudied role of the fairy godmother, has the foundations of movie magic working in its favor. The first would be timing: just in time for the holiday season, the film, directed by Sharon Maguire (best known for Bridget Jones’s Diary), proffers fresh
Disney princess canon at the tail end of an abysmal year, with audiences primed for cheerful, nuclear family escapism. There’s the comedic bona fides of its two leads, Isla Fisher and Jillian Bell, and a winning, suitably modernized premise: a well-meaning yet naively bumbling godmother on a mission to revitalize a harried single mother in present-day Boston, a fairytale trope isolated and reforged for pre-pandemic but still decidedly uninspired times. But where Godmothered should coast, it stumbles – swerving between unwieldy earnestness to something edgier and settling on something duller than it should be.
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comedy