60 out of 101 Skinned Puppies: A Review of Cruella
BY DANIEL TUNE.
Ah, Cruella. The latest self-cannibalized offering from the Disney corporation to the altars of our collective nostalgia for their older, better movies. The film is so seemingly fucked on principal that it almost sounds like a wry joke about the state of American cinema in the capitalist hellscape that is 2021.
Do you remember the puppy murderer Cruella, from 101 Dalmatians? Well, Disney made a prequel where she’s a total girlboss! It sounds like a stand-up bit in a set targeted at bitter film students, but nope! This is our reality. Cruella is here, and dear lord forgive me, it’s actually kind of fun! It’s not in any way a good example of what art can be—it’s actually pretty bad in most ways that I consider important: Emma Stone in the titular role doing a truly monstrous British accent, one of the funniest “sympathetic villain backstories” ever put to film (I won’t spoil it if you haven’t already seen the extremely meme-worthy scene), and an absolutely ridiculous overuse of hilariously obvious pop songs – the most egregious example being that the film closes with “Sympathy for The Devil” (or D’EVILLE, GET IT??). Also, it’s nearly two and a half hours long, which just seems absurd for a movie that is this...pointless?
Maybe that’s a harsh word to use, although it’s not like this movie is particularly rich with thematic depth that people can spend hours analysing. Like, Cruella is several minutes longer than the Oscar-winning Parasite. But I digress. Yes, it’s silly, and kind of represents everything wrong with movies at the moment. It flagrantly spits all over the legacy of a beloved children’s film for no good reason other than to exploit our memory of the original for the sake of profit.
I can list all the reasons it’s immoral: it’s ruthlessly and unapologetically commercial; it’s as shallow as a children’s pool; it’s for the most part an incompetently produced experience. It is the kind of thing that I should be staunchly and morally opposed to. But look, this is a movie where Emma Stone and Emma Thompson fight each other by wearing increasingly ridiculous dresses. At one point, Stone wears a dress made of trash. At another, she creates a dress made of insect cocoons, from which insects hatch and destroy all of Thompson’s dresses. What am I, made of stone? How am I supposed to tell you that a movie with those images is not a rip-roaring good time? Cruella dances to the Stooges’ song “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, which is about BDSM. In a fucking Disney movie! That’s hilarious!
The world is hell, cinema is a rotting corpse, and I thought Cruella was pretty fun.
Three out of five stars.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2021.