-The children of Disney Villains uncover an even more villainous plot than their parents could ever come up with to destroy all fairy tale life and have to team up to stop it (Disney Villain Suicide Squad), or
-The children of Disney Villains find themselves magically warped into a far future where Fairy Godmother, having used her "Happy Endings" to rid the world of all other magic users, has established herself as an all-powerful dictator (Disney Villain Samurai Jack).
Instead, writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott and director Kenny Ortega give us... the children of Disney Villains are sent to a... prep school where they learn to not be evil through friendship and team sports. Really? Okay, really.
The broad strokes are these: in the years since Belle and Beast were married, all the Disney kingdoms have been united into the kingdom of Auradon, with Beast (Dan Payne) as Overking. The villains, meanwhile, like Maleficent (Kristen Chenoweth), Evil Queen (Kathy Najimy), Jafar (Maz Jobrani) and Cruella De Vil (Wendy Raquel Robinson) have been banished to the prison colony of the Isle of the Lost, where they have each found time to birth and raise a single child to adolescence, all without seeming to have acquired a spouse at any point.
This is a problem for Beast's son Ben (Mitchell Hope), who is a month away from being crowned King of Auradon even though his father is still very much alive, and he issues a proclamation that four of the children imprisoned on the Isle of the Lost be freed from their slum to attend Auradon Prep Academy and perhaps learn to be decent human beings.
Maleficent thinks this is just grand, and charges her daughter Mal (Hope Cameron), Evil Queen's daughter Evie (Sofia Carson), Jafar's son Jay (the unfortunately named Booboo Stewart), and Cruella's son Carlos (Cameron Boyce) with the task of stealing Fairy Godmother's magic wand during their sojourn so that Maleficent can join it with her own magic staff and take over the world.
Can I just stop here for a second with a little beef? It's bad enough that in this world, you are apparantly only allowed to name your child a derivative of your own name, but Evie? Evil Queen's daughter is named Evie? You know Evil Queen isn't her actual name, right? She was the Queen of whatever kingdom Snow White was a princess of, and she sure was Evil, but she surely had a name. It was probably Gruselda or something but it was a name. They retconned her a name in Once Upon A Time but they couldn't do it here? To name her daughter after the derogatory nickname her enemies gave her after the fact is like me naming my kid Nerdy. And that's nothing on what they do to Jafar, here represented as a stereotypical Middle Eastern shopkeeper with none of the slinky leering cruelty he showed in Aladdin. Wasn't he a genie the last time we saw him? He's been reduced to Apu. And why is Cruella there? All the others actually caused harm to or threatened the life of a royal person. Cruella kidnapped fifteen dogs. That's literally the only crime she actually committed and it can't be proven.
Okay, rant over for now. The four kids are taken through the magical barrier to Auradon, where it is very much the twenty-first century and not the general middle ages where two thirds of the villains had their reigns of terror (and died, but let's not start nitpicking), where they're met by Ben and his girlfriend, Audrey (Sleeping Beauty's daughter!), and also Dopey's nerdy son Doug, who is not a Dwarf in any way. On their first night in their new digs they sneak out to find the magic wand, only to discover it's guarded by powerful magical security, and must wait out a month of school until Ben's coronation, when the wand will be used in the ceremony. The plot involves Mal concocting a love spell to make Ben dump Audrey and fall for her so that she can be front and centre during the coronation.
Will Mal find her evil heart softened by Ben's unquenchable goodness? Will Jay discover that being part of a sports team is better than being an evil loner thief? Will Carlos discover dogs are really great and not the monsters his mother made him think they were? And will Evie learn that being smart and talented is better than being dumb and pretty? You bet they will!
To be fair to Descendants, there's nothing really awful about the story or the way it's presented aside from its ridiculous concept, but since they bring that concept up over and over again it continues to get in the way of the movie working. The fact that you Only Matter if you're the child of a famous Disney character means that characters always have to stop what they're doing to mention which cartoon their parents were in. The most glaring example of this is when the only vaguely Asian member of the cast shows up and introduces herself: "Hi, I'm Lanny... (Pause, sigh, eye-roll) ...Mulan's daughter?"
If the movie has a secret weapon it's Hope Cameron as Mal. It's not that she's doing much, although she manages to portray Mal as having at least two character traits while the rest of the cast is content to stick with just one. But she has a screen presence that outdoes anyone else on screen at any time, stealing whatever scene she's in and making me really believe that she's confused about whether to be good to her mother or good to her new friends. She's the best part of the movie, and I really hope that she one day escapes the circle of Disney TV Hell that has swallowed so many talented kids in the decade since Hanna Montana made sticking talented girls into horrible TV shows an industry. On the back side, her screen mother, Chenoweth's Maleficent, is the hands down nod for worst performance, shrieking her eeeeevil proclamations at the highest register and refusing to climb down to anything human. Fine, she's the villain; her performance should be big. But her biggest scene (and her one big musical number, the grating "Do Ya Wanna Be Evil?") is the third worst scene in the movie, and you can see the horror and confusion in her eyes when she stops singing to perform a half-hearted soft-shoe, suggesting that a dance choreographer was hired, but didn't show up that day, and director Ortega just told her to wing it.
Stuck right in the middle is Mitchell Hope as Prince Ben. Unable to shoulder the weight of doing all the heavy lifting for the "good" side, and unfortunately forced through two awful musical numbers - the overproduced and Autotuned "RiDICulous" is only saved from being the worst number in the film by being immediately followed by Hope's oh-so-white hip-hop rendition of "Be Our Guest" that is an insult not only to the original song but also to the entire medium of hip-hop and the ghost of Jerry Orbach.
Story: I dearly wish I could have seen a Suicide Squad of Disney Villains, but that's my own problem, not the movie's. 0.5 Points
Moral: Don't be evil? is the moral? I have nothing against it, I guess, but it's not exactly stretching the mind. 1 Point
Execution: CGI is used sparingly, thank goodness, and mostly to make sure the ball in the Big Sports Game goes where it's supposed to go without multiple takes. I didn't mention that the Big Game is actually pretty well done. Also, Hope Cameron's performance makes it look more like a movie than it really deserves. 1 Point
Songs: The Let's Meet The Villains song, "Rotten to the Core" is pretty good, and Mal gets a good "yearning" song, "If Only", but then there's Maleficent's cackling tap-dance and that horrible "Be Our Guest". 0.5 Points
Did My Kids Like It? Oh, yes they did. All four times it played in the damn car. My wife liked it too, although she'll never admit it except under duress. 1 Point
Total Score: 4/5 points.
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