‘Snow White’ Review: Rachel Zegler Is Practically Perfect in Disney Remake Otherwise Full of Bad Ideas

In this pessimistic, cynical world of ours it’s easy to get hung up on the negative, so let’s try to be positive. There’s nothing wrong with Disney’s live-action remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that couldn’t be fixed by making it 26 minutes shorter, 88 years ago and in hand-drawn animation. 

There’s also nothing wrong with Rachel Zegler’s performance. The “West Side Story” star has walked right out of the classic cartoon, with a pitch perfect singing voice, spot-on physicality, and a theatrical, emotional performance that resonates. Zegler received endless, cruel insults from so-called Disney fans who objected to her casting — for reasons that ran from racist, to racist with other bad reasons too — but she’s the only participant in this production who completely understood the assignment and brings “Snow White” to actual, meaningful life.

Marc Webb’s remake takes the storyline of the original film, which no one can say wasn’t thin, and pads it out a bit. There are more musical numbers, most of them forgettable and some quite embarrassing, and a little more plot. Snow White (Zegler) is still a sad princess living with an Evil Queen (Gal Gadot), who still has no name. The Evil Queen envies Snow White’s beauty and dispatches a lackey to kill her. He’s supposed to bring back Snow White’s heart in a box, but instead he brings an apple, because … he’s not very smart, I guess? He knew the queen was freaky enough to ask for a human heart but he thought she’d never want to take a look at it?

Snow White flees into the forest and into the home of seven magical nightmares with CGI heads that look like sun-dried orange peels wearing too much foundation. Their faces are caricatures straight out of a beachfront boardwalk sketch stand, exaggerated in ways that spit in the face of nature when rendered in three dimensions. They are Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Grumpy, Dopey and Doc, and they are textbook examples of why some remakes are probably a bad idea. If this was the only way the great minds of Disney could imagine realizing these characters, allegedly without offense, in the 21st century, they might need a few new minds. 

Snow White also meets a dashing love interest, not a prince this time, named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap). He’s a heroic Robin Hood figure, stealing from the queen and giving to himself and his merry men — but hey, they deserve it more than she does. It’s Jonathan who challenges Snow White to become politically active and actually to put an end to the Evil Queen’s tyranny. Which she does, by asking her politely to stop, and later walking down a street and making chit-chat. If that’s all it took to end fascism we’d be living in a very different world right now.

Zegler and Burnap are cute together. They don’t so much have chemistry, per se, but they have superficial scenes where they playfully banter and stare at each other in slow-motion, and these performers make it work. He’s got enough stage presence to make the most of a cartoony role, which is more than one can say for Gal Gadot.

Gal Gadot looks every bit the Evil Queen, like an animated cel come suddenly to life. Her performance is arch, which is to be expected, but not in a fun way. It’s genuinely hard to imagine a filmmaker saying, “Cut, print it” after most of her lines. It’s the kind of performance that usually finds its way into movies in which a mean, unconvincing actor gets replaced by a better one for plot reasons. 

And when the Evil Queen has her new villain song, yikes. The number is camp and absurd, which suggests that maybe someone should have told Gadot she was supposed to be having fun this whole time. Instead it’s like watching a dinner theater version of “Richard III” get randomly interrupted by a clip from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” then plodding along again like nothing happened. Sidney Lumet argued that one of the most important things a filmmaker can do is make sure everyone on set is making the same movie, but Gal Gadot isn’t even making the same movie as Gal Gadot.

“Snow White” comes ice cold on the heels of two other big live-action adaptations of the classic fairy tale. It’s been 13 years since “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Mirror Mirror” drank this movie’s milkshake. Neither of those other films are great but they both have a consistency of tone, a memorable villain, and creative choices worth celebrating. Disney’s new “Snow White” has none of these qualities. All it has is Zegler and a bunch of actors who are trying, with uneven success, to keep up with her. 

The title character in “Snow White” has always claimed that the trick to getting a tricky job done is to whistle while you work. Keep whistling, Disney. Keep whistling.

The post ‘Snow White’ Review: Rachel Zegler Is Practically Perfect in Disney Remake Otherwise Full of Bad Ideas appeared first on TheWrap.