Disney+ launched
with many new things to enjoy, and more are on the way. One of the early
releases with the launch of the new streaming service (owned by Disney) is this
Christmas movie, Noelle.
Noelle is a
movie that tries to win you over with Christmas cheer. It tries to woo you with
Santa making a connection to a little girl who is deaf, and all the girl wants
is for her mother to get a job. It tries to woo you by making everything work
out with emotional scenes. The whole underdog-getting-ahead theme in this movie
isn’t a twist ending—you’ll have it figured out less than halfway through.
The movie’s
well-misplaced ideas of how to make a fantastic Christmas movie were pulled
together to create this film, and honestly, it sucks big time.
The plot starts far in the North Pole at Santa’s house. Santa has two children, Noelle and Nick. From the moment we join the movie, Nick is being groomed to be the new Santa, while Noelle has one job: to be his personal cheerleader. After many years, all grown up, Nick (Bill Hader) isn’t getting the whole Santa thing and is struggling big time to get things right. Their father has passed away, and the pressure is on Nick to be ready by Christmas Day to deliver presents. When Noelle (Anna Kendrick) sees her brother’s struggles, she suggests he takes a weekend off to cool down.
Nick is gone for
more than a week—in fact, he runs off—causing the elders to make Noelle and
Nick’s cousin the new Santa as they prepare for Christmas. Noelle decides she
has to find her brother, and after deducing where in the world he might be
hiding, she takes the Santa sleigh and reindeer to go find him.
Making women
take the lead seems to be something Disney is trying to do in a lot of their
projects now. Not all of their attempts at this wave of “wokeness” have been as
crappy as this one. For one thing, I have no issue with females taking the lead
or taking over roles commonly attributed to men. The moment I saw Noelle, I
wanted the movie to go in this direction. I wanted a change, and even twenty
minutes in, I could guess where the movie was going. Yet, despite hating the
crappy way it was playing out, I stayed hopeful. In the end, I believe the
Noelle character deserved a better movie to launch her place as a woman in a
role dominated by men.
I feel this movie had the idea but didn’t have the delivery power to make the splash it could have made.
0 comments:
Post a Comment