Mulan (2020) - Movie Review

 Mulan (2020)

Mulan is a remake of the fantastic animated Disney musical from 1998, it was directed by Niki Caro and stars Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee and Jet Li, and tells the story of a girl named Mulan, who pretends to be a man to join the military in order to prevent her crippled father from fighting in war. This film was highly controversial, with some of the film being filmed near Chinese concentration camps, Disney thanking many organizations associated with the Chinese Communist Party, the lead actress supporting the police in the Hong Kong riots and getting many aspects of Chinese culture wrong. I am not getting into any of that because I just want to review movies. Released in 2020 on Disney+ for a ridiculous $30 fee and select theaters, Mulan received mostly positive reviews for critics, but was trashed by audiences.

THE GOOD

I have not been a huge fan of the Disney remakes, this isn't the worst of the remakes, but there still isn't a lot that I liked about this movie. Some of the action sequences are shot competently enough, Jason Scott Lee gives a pretty solid performance, and some of the cinematography and scenery is nice. Yeah that's about it.

THE BAD

This movie was BORING! Seriously, this movie bored me to fucking sleep! I had to rewind a lot of the movie to watch the whole thing, because I found myself falling asleep several times throughout the film. There's no fun to be had here. There's no fun characters here, Mushu is gone, none of the army guys have fun personalities here, not much even happens in this movie. This movie tried selling the fact that this is a more mature, action filled film, but it's not. This movie has some pretty annoying humor in the first act, and for a supposedly more action filled film, this movie didn't have much action in it, most of the action sequences are in the last third. While some of the action is competent, there are times where it's not that impressive, it's shot in an insanely high frame rate, and it doesn't look very convincing. I'm all for action that's ridiculous, I love action films like Commando, Face/Off, Die Hard 2, but there's a right and wrong way to do it! There's no emotion in this film, I didn't care about anybody, there's no montage where Mulan is preparing to join the army like in the original, there's literally nothing here. There's very little consistency in characterization, but biggest flaw in that regard is Mulan's father. In the beginning of the film, he supports Mulan in the beginning but then literally like a couple of scenes later he is preaching to her that she needs to learn where her place is! The girl power message is stupid too! Now I have no problem with strong women in movies, Kill Bill is one of my favorite movies, Wonder Woman is one of the best superhero movies in the past 10 years, but this movie suffers from the exact same problem as Captain Marvel where in order for the female hero to be strong, she has to have zero flaws and have an extreme lack of personality or emotion. It seriously contributes to how fucking boring the movie is.

CONCLUSION

Mulan is a horrible remake that's boring and lacks any passion whatsoever. There's little action, no interesting or fun characters, nothing makes sense, there's no reason for me to care about Mulan in this film. I would not have cared about the lack of action if I was invested in the story and characters, but because I wasn't invested in fucking anything, the lack of action just made everything even more boring, and the action wasn't even that impressive in the first place. I have completely lost all hope in Disney remakes being good. It's not as bad as Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, Beauty and the Beast and ESPECIALLY The Lion King, this remake still didn't convince me that these Disney remakes are anything more than desperate cash grabs with little effort and passion.

3.8/10

FILM INFO

Rating:  PG-13 (for sequences of violence)

Run time:  115 min

Release date:  September 4th, 2020

Studio:  Walt Disney Pictures