Film Review - Cruella (2021)

 Cruella stars Emma Stone as Cruella Deville who this time is set in 1970’s Punk era London and heads to work for a ruthless fashion designer (Emma Thompson) while also living with her 2 housemates (Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry) and Cruella is determined to upstage her boss for you see the only thing she’s looking for is an outfit that looks good.

 

Cruella surprisingly was good fun and firstly this is down to the overall look of the film, there is a very nice recreation of 1960s and 70s Punk era London which looks great from the townhouses to the fashion studio to the cars and costumes it all looks great on a nice cinema screen.

 

Also the cast are very good here, Emma Stone sounds like she’s imitating Eva Green (who would’ve been fantastic in this role by the way) but she is very good here, I also really enjoyed seeing Paul Walter Hauser again after his criminally overlooked performance in Richard Jewell early last year and Jodi Fry and Mark Strong are good here as well.

 

But the film has a couple of big problems:

 

- Firstly the film is far too long, it runs for 2 hours 15 minutes but it felt more like 2 and a half hours and as a result the film tends to drag a lot for most of the films runtime and it takes a fair while to find it’s groove but thankfully once it does it held my interest.

 

- Secondly there are way too many needle drop soundtrack songs on the sound mix, I get that the film is set in 1970’s London but there are only so many times where having a song from that era on the sound mix but here it is done way too often and too many times for it to really have a proper impact on the viewer.

 

- And lastly Emma Thompson is not that good here in this movie and I felt she was a little miscast, the entire time I kept thinking “I wish Olivia Coleman had played this role instead” as I felt she would’ve brought that same black comedy energy that she brought to her Oscar winning role in the Favourite in 2019 and Thompson plays the part way too seriously like she’s copying Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada and it didn’t sit well with me not to mention the way her character plays out in the story just made a miscast feel that much more worse for me.

 

And so that was Cruella and despite some missteps this is still a fun ride worth taking, 3 out of 5.