Beauty and the Beast is based off of the 1991 animated film of the same name and Emma Watson plays Belle who lives in her little town, it's a quiet village, every day like the one before all the while she tries to fight off Gaston (Luke Evans) but when her father Maurice (Kevin Kline) goes missing she finds herself at an enchanted castle and a tale as old as time, true as it can be.
I was very very very nervous going into see this movie mainly because I was a kid of the 90s who watched that original film on Video along with Aladdin and the Lion King but the casting of Ms Watson as Belle did give me some sliver of hope that it could deliver the goods but could it deliver or just end up feeling like a lot of remakes do and that is there was no need for it.
Well this movie was indeed better than I thought it was going to be but not by much and I will start with the positives of course it's great to hear those original songs again and in about 30 seconds you could sing all of them off by heart as I did in the cinema especially Be Our Guest and the Mob Song plus Kline, Evans and Sir Ian McKellen are really good here and make the most of their scenes in the film.
But sadly the storytelling here didn't really feel all that different in the sense that it didn't do enough to really push the image of the original film out of my head and it didn't help that many scenes just felt padded out in order to try and justify a live action film running time and this was at its worse in the songs which would go on and then stop before the next verse is sung and it really got on my nerves.
And also (and I really hate to say this) but Watson was very disappointing as Belle for 2 reasons first of all her singing was not the best especially during the opening Belle number now it does improve in the 2nd half of the film but seeing that just made me wish her opening songs had been reshot to take advantage of this.
The other reason is that at times her British accent comes through in her line readings and she begins to sound more like Hermione from the Harry Potter series personally speaking I would've preferred someone like Anne Hathaway as Belle who could sing as she proved with I Dreamed a Dream in Les Mis which won her the Academy Award that year but I wasn't to know any of that when Watson was announced in the role.
And so that was Beauty and the Beast an okay adaptation but it really makes me not want a live action Aladdin and it is not for younger children as the climax will scare them easily, 2 out of 5.
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