How do you go about getting the audience to sympathize with a despicable character whose only goal in life is to skin a bunch of cute pups alive for a coat? Easy: you make the Dalmatians the villains by having them kill her mother!
Yes, this is the event that sets little Estella on the path to embracing her darker side and becoming one of the most hated Disney villains in history. It's not quite as black and white (no pun) as a once-sweet little girl growing up to become a pooch-hating maniac, but since the movie firmly establishes its unsubtle approach to the material early on, that might have worked better than the toothless origin story that plays out in Cruella.
Ten years after her mother's tragic canine-calamity, Estella (Emma Stone) and her partners in crime Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) make ends meet by pulling off con-jobs in 1970s London. The fashion-obsessed Estella longs for more, though, and gets the opportunity to climb the corporate ladder when her creations catch the eye of the elegant, but tyrannical Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). Unfortunately, when Estella spots her late mother's treasured necklace around the Baroness' neck, the long-dormant "Cruella" side of her personality begins to re-emerge.
Stone is on top form in the lead, and even though her transformation is a little rushed, she has a blast playing the flamboyant and vengeance-fuelled "Queen of Mean." Thompson is also at her scenery-chewing best, and the film bristles to life whenever the two leads share the screen. The supporting cast don't fare quite as well. The sleepy-eyed Hauser provides a few laughs (rotten accent and all), but Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Kayvan Novak are awkwardly shoe-horned in as Anita and Roger only to force a connection to the original 101 Dalmatians, and Mark Strong is wasted as Hellman's right-hand man.
I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie has a knack for an entertaining heist sequence, and the soundtrack is terrific (a few of the needle-drops might be a bit on-the-nose, but, again, subtlety is not the aim here), but Cruella begins to outstay its welcome when there's still about 40 minutes to go, and ultimately fails to fully commit to its own premise.
Estella never actually breaks bad. She gets a little selfish, maybe even more ruthless, but we never see her even contemplate abandoning her humanity to become the monster we know she eventually will. It's like Gillespie and his team of writers couldn't figure out how to make their protagonist evil while keeping the audience on side, so settled for leaving her as a slightly inconsiderate antihero. You could argue that taking the character in such a dark direction might be a bit much for a Disney movie, but then why bother? It's not like anyone was crying out for a Cruella de Vil origin story in the first place, so if you're going to do something wrong, at least do it right... dahling.
Cruella is far from a disaster and the main players ensure there's fun to be had, but the pieces never come together to form much more than an inert, overlong caper with nice costumes. The verbal barbs may cut, but Disney's latest live-action offering is all bark, no bite.