First Take: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms- since when was ballet welcome in modern films?

SYNOPSIS: A young girl is transported into a magical world of gingerbread soldiers and an army of mice.

Strap yourselves in folks, the first of this year’s Christmas-inspired films has hit cinemas, and boy howdy, do we have a rant and a half for this one. I went into this one open minded, and 99 minutes later, well, not only am I angry, but I am properly disappointed too.

Lasse

Hallström and Joe Johnston direct a film that is all over the shop- the pacing is just ludicrous, and it’s obvious where the reshoots happened (Hallström was originally set to take sole credit, before Johnston did a month of pickups), because the way this film is presented simply doesn’t make any sense whatsoever- yes, the script from Ashleigh Powell has promise, but the amount of dull plot elements, awful dialogue (I’m looking at you, Keira Knightley’s character) and formulaic narratives on offer have been done a million times before, and believe me, audiences are getting fed up of this. It is shot really well by Oscar winner Linus Sandgren, the production design is incredible, and James Newton Howard’s score just about does the job, but it’s hard to find things to praise in this film.

That leads us on to the performances, and yet again, Mackenzie Foy, better known as Renesmee from Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 and Young Murph from Interstellar puts in some really good work, saving this film from the depths of hell where I ask what actually happened, and working alongside her is a cast that are ridiculously underutilised. You’ve got Keira Knightley, Dame Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Jack Whitehall (yes, he’s in Hollywood nowadays), Richard E. Grant and many others; all of them suffer with clunky dialogue and a film basically built around CG setpieces- there’s literally one scene where you can tell Knightley was shot on a sound stage.

It’ll do well with the family audience without shadow of a doubt, but I really do have to question exactly why Disney wanted to reshoot bits of the film, in some case re-write bits of the film and most importantly, why they even bothered releasing this to cinemas in the first place. It’s dull, boring, and like many critics have said, soulless too.

THE VERDICT

Nutcracker and the Four Realms has good bits. But it has more bad bits. WAY more bad bits. The performances save the film from being an absolute bomb, but a combination of poor script, poor direction, and very poor pacing does not make an ideal big screen experience. There are better films out there, and the looming shadow of Fantastic Beasts should put cinemas out of their misery very soon.

RATING: 2.5/5