Angelina Jolie, Michelle Pfeiffer and Elle Fanning do their best in second revisionist fairytale, but CGI battles kill the story
This sequel has got a great cast. It’s not just
Angelina Jolie reprising her post-fairytale turn as Maleficent from the 2014 film, the wicked witch from the Sleeping Beauty story who isn’t quite as wicked as all that and whose reputed wickedness may simply be a function of patriarchal mythology. There’s also the estimable Elle Fanning back again as Aurora, the demure princess who has now made up with Maleficent, regarding her as a godmother. Plus we now get Michelle Pfeiffer on decent form as Aurora’s mother,
Queen Ingrith. Aurora moreover has a stepfather these days, King John (Robert Lindsay) to replace the caddish and now late King Stefan (played by Sharlto Copley) from the first film, who turned out to be the real baddie. The three digitised pixies are back – Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville – and Chiwetel Ejiofor now has a cameo as one of the horned, winged creatures from the Moors, that disputed land adjacent to the humans’ kingdom where Maleficent hails from. Sam Riley returns as Diaval, Maleficent’s raven-turned-humanoid familar.
But the awful truth is that despite all this star-power, Maleficent 2 is a bit weak, and it runs out of narrative steam before the halfway mark. Maleficent is not the mistress of evil: most of the evilness has now been deconstructed out of her, and the mistress-of-evil position is clearly going to be usurped from Maleficent by a certain someone else, someone who will be presented to us as genuinely bad but whose evident depravity may yet be explained or backstoried away in Maleficent 3. For now, it’s a question of being plain bad, and therefore a bit of a scene-stealer. Maleficent herself has become about as scary or revisionist as one of the Addams Family films. Mistress of Evil increasingly explains her reputation in terms of her coming from the Moors: a tribal or ethnic difference: she is alienated, marginalised, othered.