Younger-Grownup franchises are a golden goose. Should you’re a movie studio or streaming service with a Harry Potter or a Starvation Video games in your docket, chances are high, it’ll be laying profitable little eggs for years. It makes good sense, then, that Netflix — who’ve cornered the teenager market lately — may need to adapt The College For Good And Evil, the vastly common YA guide collection by Soman Chainani. It makes much less sense {that a} filmmaker like Paul Feig would flip it into… this.
Feig’s CV speaks for itself: he’s collectively liable for Freaks & Geeks, one of many best TV exhibits ever made, and in movies like Bridesmaids and Spy, he’s liable for a number of the sharpest, funniest cinematic comedies of the previous decade. Little of that comedic prowess is recognisable in The College For Good And Evil. It’s, we take no pleasure in reporting, a complete mess.
The place to even start? All of it kicks off with an introductory voiceover from Cate Blanchett, which itself looks like a cynical transfer — a movie so missing in gravitas that it feels it should borrow some from one other. (Sure, we bear in mind the Fellowship prologue too!) From there, we’re welcomed to a completely binary twin college of fine guys and dangerous guys; basically a fantasy tackle high-school jocks versus goths.
It’s genuinely exhausting to search out redeeming options.
All of it bears such a resemblance to Hogwarts — proper right down to the fort design — that J.Ok. Rowling’s attorneys could also be contemplating their choices. There’s Laurence Fishburne as Dumbledore by the use of Morpheus, Charlize Theron as Snape by the use of Maleficent, and Kerry Washington as Gilderoy Lockhart by the use of Giselle from Enchanted. Actually thrown into this combine are Agatha (Sofia Wylie) and Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso), by chance despatched into the improper faculties the place they need to, with excruciating slowness, study thunderingly apparent classes about assembly one another within the center.
It’s genuinely exhausting to search out redeeming options. A number of the appearing is extra befitting of a foul panto. The CGI is usually ugly. The visuals are a chaotic mish-mash of types. The dialogue is cacklingly tacky (“Did you actually assume it could be that simple?” snarls one baddie). The magic is concurrently over-explained and ill-defined. The make-up equates facial disfigurement with ethical wickedness. The runtime is, unforgivably, two-and-a-half hours.
All of it feels indicative of the present cheap-and-cheerless franchise gold rush (a shameless tease for a future movie appears to substantiate that intention). As a chilly enterprise choice, it’s what it’s; what’s exhausting to grapple with is why Feig could be behind it. He’s a gifted filmmaker and able to a lot extra. The one identifiable artefact of his filmmaking voice is in his longtime championing of ladies, in his centring of feminine characters. That purpose is admirable; sadly, on this case, the fabric drags everybody down with it.
