If only it didn’t also cringe so obviously at itself.Cast: Mackenzie Foy, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Keira Knightly, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman The brutal efficiency of the priss factory ultimately demands respect.
The movie’s interlude, in which the action more or less stops for a performance by Copeland, is also lovely.
CAST OF THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS MOVIE
Grant and Eugenio Derbez, two comic crackerjacks, have few lines and even fewer of their facial features visible behind elaborate (albeit splendid) costumes.Īnd yet, for all its many faults as a movie and a commercial product, I’m so glad I got to visit the Four Realms for its glittery formalwear, its bear-monsters made of a thousand mice, its truly astounding living matryoshka dolls jumping out of one another.
Playing the Snow King and the Flower King, respectively, Richard E. Clara’s best friend in the Four Realms, a Nutcracker soldier (Jayden Fowora-Knight), has even less of, well, anything. Its protagonist doesn’t have enough of a personality to support a character arc, and its villainess’s motivations keep changing by the second, even in her “this is why I’m bad” speech. Written by Ashleigh Powell and Tom McCarthy (yes, that one), The Nutcracker is the kind of movie whose emotional beats you resent because they fall flatter than a sewer grate and slow down an otherwise briskly paced story. (If this synopsis is hard to follow and not a little hallucinogenic, rest assured: There is so much more overwhelming nonsense I’ve left as surprises for viewers.)
That involves retrieving a key that Mother Ginger’s mouse minion stole-a key that would also open the locked metal egg that Clara’s mom left as the girl’s only inheritance. As the daughter of the woman who brought the toys to life, it’s up to Clara to enforce the peace that her recently deceased mother would have imposed. Mother Ginger (Mirren), ruler of the Land of Amusements, is trying to take over the other three realms. Attired beehive to toe in sparkling lavender, the Sugar Plum Fairy (a hilariously baby-voiced Knightley, channeling Marie Antoinette by way of Marilyn Monroe) fills Clara in on what’s been happening in toy land. Taking place on Christmas Eve, there’s nothing quite believable about The Nutcracker-including an eyepatched Morgan Freeman as the world’s most extroverted inventor, throwing London’s most opulent holiday party-until we get to the Four Realms. Here, that girl, Clara, is played by Mackenzie Foy (a 17-year-old American badly affecting a posh accent, but with those preternaturally wise eyes, she’s otherwise well cast as someone who doesn’t quite make sense in the human world). The older sister that The Nutcracker clearly aspires to be is Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which also found a misfit teenage girl in Victorian England escape to a whimsical alternate universe, then become its savior. “That’s a bit much,” you can hear the Capitol dwellers of Panem jealously sniff about these dresses. In fact, the only character who shows a hint of (campy) libido is condemned to nonexistence. I don’t believe any of the characters, including the ones that are parents, have ever fucked. (“That’s a bit much,” you can hear the Capitol dwellers of Panem jealously sniff about these dresses.) But The Nutcracker’s onslaught of wholesomeness also lays waste to anything that might stand in its way, leaving it crushed under the boot heels of its tin soldiers. Its visual gifts to the audience are admittedly prodigious and include a Christmas tree reveal, a ball and a pageant, and a CGI extravaganza of toys come to life. The movie wears innocence as ballgown and protective armor, its aggressive guilelessness both fanciful and defensive. It asks all who enter to check their cynicism at the door, to journey through the Land of Sweets atop a horse named Jingles, and to be patient until we finally reach a long-awaited father-daughter dance. The new fantasy adventure The Nutcracker and the Four Realms doesn’t play fair.
CAST OF THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS TV
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