112 min | PG | September 3, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A scrappy seamstress dreams of running her own dress shop while a reluctant prince dreams of escaping his crown. Kay Cannon swaps the fairy godmother for Billy Porter and the orchestra for a karaoke playlist. The dress is the only thing that fits.
Cinderella works as a seamstress in a basement and wants to open a dress shop instead of marrying into the royal court. Kay Cannon takes the oldest rags-to-riches story in the catalog and reframes it as a parable about female ambition under patriarchy. The wicked stepmother is now a thwarted careerist. The prince is a man who would rather not inherit. This is a jukebox musical that grafts pop songs onto a fairy tale and asks the audience to accept that the seams will not show.
Camila Cabello plays Ella with energy and a strong singing voice that the script never connects to a personality. She delivers the girlboss monologues at the same volume she sings, and the two registers blur together. Nicholas Galitzine plays Prince Robert as a sulky heir who lands the few genuine laughs the movie earns. Idina Menzel plays the stepmother Vivian and gives the only performance with real interior weather, turning a cardboard villain into a woman crushed by her own foreclosed choices. Billy Porter plays the Fabulous Godmother in a single scene and exits before the role becomes anything. Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver play the bickering King Rowan and Queen Beatrice as a sitcom couple stranded in the wrong genre.
Cannon writes and directs, and the direction exposes the limits of the writing. The musical numbers are cut into rapid fragments that never let a single shot hold long enough to register choreography as a whole. The camera cranes and swoops over the marketplace crowds, but the editing chops the spectacle into pieces that refuse to assemble. The needle drops arrive on the nose. A song about wanting more plays over a woman wanting more, and the staging adds nothing the lyric did not already state. The production design dresses the village in storybook pastels that fight the modern slang coming out of the characters’ mouths.
The film wants to be a feminist update and a crowd-pleasing singalong at once, and the two goals keep colliding. Ella’s ambition gets stated in dialogue and then resolved by the same prince she claims not to need. The modern jokes undercut the romance, and the romance undercuts the politics. Cannon assembles the parts of a knowing reinvention without finding the tone that would fuse them. What remains is a karaoke night in period costume that mistakes volume for joy.