"Not if we can help it!"
Following a nifty animated recap and set-up at the start, Disney's belated sequel to the delightful Enchanted finds time moved on with Giselle and Robert now parents to a stereotypically sarcastic teen daughter and a baby moving to a new life in rural suburban Monroeville, with a wishing wand MacGuffin and Giselle's desire for a fairy-tale life quickly unravelling and corrupting and pitching her against the local queen bee, played here by Maya Rudolph. Some of the strengths of the original film are evident here - Amy Adams again charms magnificently, James Masters's Prince still blusters preposterously (but is criminally underused this time around), and the juxtaposition of fairy-tale and real-life values has some effective moments - and the freshness of the first film is here tempered with more maturity and an interesting character arc for Giselle as she moves into antagonist territory. However, the other characters have little to do other than to grind through the plot mechanics (even Robert's fairy-tale character growth segment feels shoehorned in), Rudolph's character feels underwritten, and the industrial-strength songs feel more like a commercial Frozen necessity than integral to the plot. Nevertheless, Disenchanted runs with its inherent silliness, written and delivered with a largely effective lightness of touch and sense of playfulness that overall does not match the original.
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