Starring Emma Stone, Emma Thompson

Directed by Craig Gillespie

Disney, out now and on Disney+ Premium

The lifestory of the last person you’d put in charge of doggy daycare…

I’m reliably informed that Disney’s new live action take on an animated classic – an origin story for the eponymous Dalmatian hating villainess of Dodie Smith’s 1956 children’s novel – has had mixed reviews. Indeed, I’m told that some critics are really quite sniffy about it. Normally I’d agree that everyone’s entitled to their opinion but I’m not in the mood for that today. They’re wrong. That’s it. I’ve said it. Right here in Black and White.

See what I did there?

Because Dalmatians are… and Cruella’s hair is…?

After fifteen months of long lensed indie realism, with only the disappointment of Tenet to vaguely remind us what a big screen can do, and while other potential blockbusters such as Wonder Woman 1984 were consigned to streaming platforms – Cruella is a fabulous two-and-a-quarter hours of proper film making, which must be seen in a cinema on the biggest screen you can find and the best sound system with which to wrap its wonderful soundtrack around you. That’s an order.

I can guarantee no spoilers when I tell you that it’s the story of how Estella (Emma Stone) becomes Cruella (Emma Stone). I credit Ms Stone twice because it’s a classy, assured performance digging into a famously 2D animated icon and finding depth and vulnerability and wit before she fully evolves into the dog-napper supreme we love to hate. Her even more evil oppo is another Emma (of the Thompson genus), who chews the scenery as Baroness Von Hellman, and is clearly having a great time, enjoying the frocks (which are astonishing throughout) and adding class, depth and intelligence when it’s needed too.

We all love a bit of Mark Strong, but sadly we do only get a bit of him here. He’s underused, if pivotal, but he got to pick up the cheque so I’m sure he isn’t complaining.

But what really welds the cast together is the strength of the supporting cast. Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser are laugh-out-loud funny as Jasper and Horace Badun, the incompetent stooges from the original animated iteration. This kind of old fashioned, almost theatrical double act is incredibly hard to pull off on screen, but these guys have real chemistry and play the characters truthfully, but with a nod to the classic ‘Broker’s Men’ tradition of Pantomime and beyond. The movie is full of cineaste nods – the extended travelling shots of Martin Scorsese, The Devil Wears Prada, and notes of classic Billy Wilder and even Stanley Kubrick to name but four – but my favourite is when Hauser, an American actor, very obviously and very affectionately channels the late Bob Hoskins, at one point turning up in a boiler suit in a direct homage to Hoskins’s passive aggressive heating engineer from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The icing on the casting cake sees John McCrea (Everybody’s Talking About Jamie) breaking new ground as the first openly gay character in a live-action Disney movie, delivering a memorable turn as Artie, the flamboyant owner of a vintage fashion shop recruited to help Cruella in her transformative quest for revenge.

However, what makes this such a cinematic joy is the way the film is rendered. The Art Direction and Production Design are both flawless, executed with a visceral joy, flair and love for the project, right down to the last roll of St Izal toilet paper. The costumes are drool inducingly superb – think Phantom Thread, but on crack. Meanwhile, the camera dips, dives and weaves in a blissful return to CINEMA with a capital C and all the other upper-case letters.

Oh yes, and there’s that soundtrack I mentioned. It might be a period jukebox, but it cost them a fortune to license and it is brilliantly and wittily assembled.

Director Craig Gillespie may not be a household name, and arguably has an uneven cv, but having helmed Lars and the Real Girl (one of my favourite American Indy movies) – not to mention the excellent I, Tonya – with Cruella he shows himself to be a director of real skill who I predict has many more exceptional movies left in his tank.

This is A-Team film making, and we all love it when a plan comes together.

Caveats? Dana Fox and Tony McNamara’s script is razor sharp and mostly meticulously structured, but it does have a sixth act, forcing the film clumsily to stop and start again before launching into its final movement. Oh yes, and the Americanisms. Why oh why oh why? The movie is so carefully located in the London of the 1960s and 70s, why not take the same care over the dialogue? Emma Thompson’s visible disdain for some of her more incongruous American phraseology hits you like a wave of acidic SensurroundTM. Lastly, perhaps there’s a question about who it’s for. It’s a UK 12 Certificate and it’s definitely not for small children. Many of the emotional themes driving the narrative are centred on an adult sensibility. If Cruella doesn’t draw in audiences as Disney needs it to then it may be in part due to the film lacking a clear demographic identity.

Verdict: Having said that, this reviewer adores this movie for exactly what it is, and I wouldn’t want to change a frame of it. In fact, as Dalmatian movies go, this one is…. spot on.

See what I did there? 9/10

Martin Jameson