First Take: Beauty and the Beast (2017)- bold and extravagant yet challenging to watch

SYPNOSIS: An adaptation of the Disney fairy tale about a monstrous-looking prince and a young woman who fall in love.

I really, really wanted to enjoy this live action remake of the seminal 1991 animated film that we all know and love, but for some reason I left Bill Condon’s latest feeling a little underwhelmed.

Condon does direct this film very well, using his work on the final two Twilight films to create a much darker version of the ‘tale as old as time’, and I cannot fault him for that. It is written well by Steven Chbosky and Evan

Spiliotopoulos, and elicits the right emotions at the right places, but the main issue is the running time. There are bits of the film that feel dragged out, and sure, 2 hours 9 minutes is a respectable runtime for a summer blockbuster, but at least 20 minutes could be cut here and there.

Performance wise, Emma Watson does a great job as Belle, with the supporting cast (including a very menacing Luke Evans as Gaston and a brilliant Dan Stevens as the Beast) putting in some great work too. It is also shot brilliantly by Tobias Schliessler, and with the legendary Alan Menken coming back to score the film (and reorchestrate the songs from the 1991 original), there is a lot of prestige here, but a few tiny details marred my experience with the film- sure, it may have done £20million on its first weekend here in the UK, but I legitimately left screen 5 at my local multiplex with mixed feelings.

THE VERDICT

With some incredible production design and choreography, this new take on Beauty and the Beast will certainly appease die-hard fans of the original, however, the running time is a little problematic considering that it is 45 minutes longer than the original film that many people generally seem to favour.

Rating: 4/5