Many people know the story of Sleeping Beauty and most of those people know it from the Disney animated movie SLEEPING BEAUTY, but the revisionist take from the point-of-view of the villain Maleficent is a great take on the title character where she is both hero and villain.   MALEFICENT is a well rounded fairy tale where the movie stand on the shoulder of Angelina Jolie’s performance where every other character I could care less about and Jolie sells the movie with one of her best emotionally layered performances.  It is also a visually fantastic movie where the story also makes you root for Maleficent whether she is good or evil.   It is a fallen angel tale of sorts.   I know Disney is seeing dollar signs and they hope to make a sequel, but I hope they don’t make a sequel and leave well enough alone because not every movie needs a sequel and hopefully Angelina Jolie says no.

 

The tale starts with Maleficent as a young fairy child who falls for a human boy named Stefan, but there paths diverge as they grow and Maleficent is betrayed by Stefan’s ambitions.   She curses his daughter to fall into a death like sleep before she turns 21 if she pricks her finger on a spinning needle.   The movie shows her struggle to defend her land and get her revenge while Stefan looks to destroy her.   It is one of the best Disney movies I have seen in a while and I wonder how the animated SLEEPING BEAUTY will measure up to it (it comes to blu-ray in October and I bet they will release MALEFICENT on the same day to Blu-ray and DVD as SLEEPING BEAUTY). It does rest on Angelina Jolie’s shoulders and if you didn’t get someone like her to play Maleficent, MALEFICENT wouldn’t have been as good.

 

This movie review is ©6-7-2014 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com

 

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