Film Review - Into the Woods

I am a big fan of Anna Kendrick. If she had filmed 10 hours of herself walking around New York I might have been interested enough to watch it. So I was going to see this movie as soon as her name was on it. If the cast then includes the likes of Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Captain Kirk, my attendance is guaranteed regardless of story or director. James Corden and Johnny Depp being in it did worry me but I got over that by about 5 minutes in.

I didn't realise how musical it was going to be. I expected something more like Mamma Mia or Pitch Perfect or Frozen with big chunks of story running between songs. It took me a while to get into the idea that almost every line would be sung but by the time Lilla Crawford completely upstages Johnny Depp I was already wondering when I would be able to get tickets for the sing-along version. 

Squeezing the fairy tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel and Cinderella in around a new story was clever. Keeping in the creepier parts of the fairy tales caught me by surprise though. I expected Disney to stick with their sanitised versions, especially around the fates of Cinderella's sisters. 

Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen in their 'prince-off' duet is beyond hilarious. Rarely, if ever, have I known a cinema audience break into such spontaneous, prolonged and genuine laughter, but when Chris Pine tears his shirt open the audience went crazy.

For me, there was a better and more Disney-fied stopping point just after the royal wedding. From that point on there wasn't anything I felt added to the movie and not even a song that was worth stretching it out for. Kendrick and Corden's duet of Not Alone is good, but it wasn't worth the extra 30 minutes stretching the film out to get it.

Considering the strengths of the films that have been out so far in 2015 it is pretty impressive for a full-on fairy tale musical to come out ahead of them. But in hindsight with it being Meryl Streep doing Disney doing Sondheim, that was actually predictable enough. It needed to be pretty special to overtake Eddie Redmayne's Stephen Hawking biopic and I am not going to be in the majority here but for me this was better.

Best film of the year so far. 

Rating 8/10.