My favourite little mermaid is in London’s Horniman Museum. A little under two feet long, it’s a nightmarish amalgamation of teeth, scale and hair. Once owned by the American showman PT Barnum, it looks like you might dredge it from the bath plug after an energetic plunging session.
This woebegone curio is sadly not the inspiration for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Instead, Rob Marshall’s new film is a live-action remake of the 1989 cartoon, which starred Jodi Benson as the shell-bikinied mermaid Ariel who must find love with landlubber Prince Eric to throw off a curse and her father’s tyrannical control.
It’s the studio’s latest attempt to reimagine its stable of beloved, but troublesome, classics. These rehashes haven’t been altogether successful, ranging from the pleasant but pointless (2016’s The Jungle Book) to the pointless and childhood-scarring – Tim Burton’s dour, steampunk Dumbo being a notable example.
Happily, The Little Mermaid comfortably leaps clear of the lot. It serves as a handsome homage while persuasively making the case as its own discrete entity. This time, Ariel is played by 23-year-old singer Halle Bailey. With five Grammy nominations, she brings an unarguable emotional force to the musical numbers, filling them with blustery yearning. On screen, too, she has genuine star wattage, outshining Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric.
Here, the poor chap is given even less to do than in the cartoon and, while he gamely essays a kind of hapless affability, he mostly comes across as, well, wet. It’s the sort of role Hugh Grant once made his own, and I kept wishing a Grantish glint of self-awareness to redeem the foppish stammering.
