The ultimate Disneyfied superhero movie, Craig Gillespie's CRUELLA (2021), cleverly and winningly blends campy 1960s' Batman/ Batgirl action with 1980s' pop-video aesthetics, as post-modern anti-heroine outwits murderously wicked fashionista Baroness. This prequel delivers Emma (Stone) vs. Emma (Thompson) adding 'Emma Peel' (m appeal) that wittily folds meta-verse aspects of Avengers (both the spy-fi TV show and Marvel's team) into the urban mythology started by Stephen Herek's 101 Dalmatians (1996), and Kevin Lima's weak sequel 102 Dalmatians (2000), but I was not a fan of either live-action movie, despite the genuine screen presence of Glenn Close, as de Vil.
'Orphaned' Estella is the vengefully ambitious outsider who breaks into an ultra-competitive class-driven puppy-love fantasy world, where posh couture meets punk rag-trade. Greedy sneers and shaggy-dog stories of injustice mix panto hysterics and street-wise grifting. Its somewhat charmingly neo-Dickensian comedy of London is sometimes incompetently spotty, but spots are clearly essential here. From withering contempt for dysfunctional family-baggage and snobby secrets, to poetic inheritance closure, perhaps this medley of comic-book themes and shreds of prefab surrealistic subgenre shouldn't work but, happily, it really does. Rejection of any puns would be so petty. I wonder how this might play on a double-bill with Davd Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada (2006)?
