The Little Mermaid review – watery remake is an artless deluge of corporate sludge

The great trick that any studio tentpole blockbuster has to pull off is to, through some combination of artistry and pure fun, make you forget you’re fundamentally consuming a product. It’s a trick that the Disney live-action remakes have never quite figured out – you can almost see a Q2 earnings report peeking out from behind the scenery whenever a new one is unleashed, a problem retained and sometimes even worsened in Rob Marshall’s redo of The Little Mermaid. Visually unappealing, bafflingly overlong, and missing all the magic of the animated original, it’s an obvious corporate sludge in its most undiluted form.

Essentially following the plot of the 1989 version, albeit whilst adding in a bunch of extraneous stuff to pad out the runtime to an interminable 135 minutes (the original was a sleek 83), our Disney princess here is Ariel (Halle Bailey), a curious young mermaid who longs to join in with the human world above the surface of the sea. Told to stay in her watery lane by her overbearing father King Triton (Javier Bardem, looking in every scene like he’s here under duress), Ariel nonetheless falls in love with hunky human Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), and it’s not long before she’s made an ill-advised deal with evil sea witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy). From here it’s all the loss of voice and “true love’s kiss” that you remember, just pulled off with next to zero panache.

The Little Mermaid is, put simply, an ugly movie. Underlit and suffering from poor underwater VFX work, it’s mostly a pain to look at, and that’s before all the photorealistic animals get involved. As the marketing suggested, some of the creatures have simply been made dull by the live-action treatment (see the Awkwafina-voiced gull Scuttle), whilst others have become actively off-putting, like crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs, the only cast member bringing any sort of charm) and the genuinely horrifying take on Flounder (Jacob Tremblay).

Next to the vibrant ocean world of the original or – to take a recent live-action example – Avatar 2 (hell, even the glitzy CG of Moana is leagues ahead of this), the seven seas here make for a dull and murky place. With little to look at and an awfully long time to look at it for, The Little Mermaid outstays its welcome by a colossal amount of time, not helped by the fact that Bailey and Hauer-King are both pretty wooden presences in the leads – the final scene borders on the embarrassing.

Bailey can really sing, which does help in the otherwise lifeless musical numbers, but this is not a charismatically acted movie – even McCarthy, doing a relatively faithful job as the drag act-inspired villain of the piece, feels flat and underpowered. When it comes down to it, there really is nothing to recommend this ahead of the original – and with its muted colours and longer runtime there’s a good chance it’ll bore any restless kids you might be bringing with you – just another in the long line of live-action remakes that fundamentally misunderstand the core appeals and artistry of their source material.

The Little Mermaid is released UK cinemas