"The Little Mermaid (2018)" review

Y'know guys, beating Disney to the punch of their own inevitable remake isn't an accomplishment to brag about in and of itself.


If “The Little Mermaid (2018)” is going to be memorable for anything at all, it will be the new metric it has set for how long it can take a bad movie to convince me that I should probably just walk right back out the auditorium door while I still have the chance.

Having vague memories of the trailer for this thing landing over a year ago and seeing no advertisement for it since within days of its impending release in mid-August along with its most high profile actor being one of the “Narnia” kids, my expectations for this weren’t so much low as they were nonexistent.

Less than 4 minutes into this movie, I was greeted with an animated recap of “The Little Mermaid” fairy tale flash animation so stilted and awkward that it made Newgrounds amateur projects look Emmy worthy by comparison, followed by an awkward transition to a grandmother regaling this tale to her two terrible child actor grand daughters who look so checked out of what’s happening one of them flat out falls asleep in between takes. All of this to create a scene so cheap that were I not aware of the current state of some of these actors, I’d swear this was a direct to video movie that was vaulted over 2 decades ago.

That pervasive sense of cheapness and unintentional dating for something that should be theoretically timeless almost unintentionally becomes a centerpiece to the identity of “The Little Mermaid (2018).”

Billed as some sort of loose adaptation that follows the consequences of a manufactured tragic twist on the original fairy tale, thus defeating any purpose in adapting it to begin with, the movie follows a reporter and his ward pursuing rumors of water that can magically cure ailments being hocked outside of a circus in Mississippi.

The two discover a young woman that claims to be a mermaid, enslaved by the cruel magic wielding ring master of the circus and investigate his nefarious operation in hopes of releasing her from servitude while the reporter, Cam, confronts the question of whether magic is real.

By no means am I a fable purist but if you were going to use one of the most famous modern fairy tales as the basis for a film released in an age where Disney is capitalizing on remakes of their famous interpretations of fairytales which includes “The Little Mermaid,” it just seems to me like a good place to start would be actually utilizing the material at hand.

The idea of rediscovering love after scorn to show that emotional damage can heal over time or just presenting an overall more cynical Little Mermaid after having her romanticized world view torn down to have to reconcile its worth with the way the world works for better or worse as an extended coming of age narrative could have been a unique revisionist take on a story that sits in an awkward space in pop culture.

Unfortunately, “The Little Mermaid (2018)” can’t even be bothered to be about its titular figure, framing the clunky and baseless romance between her and Cam as a sort of mystical adventure for his wide-eye innocent ward to have her childish belief in magic validated as a means of justifying the child at heart mentality without providing a proper challenge for it.

What ensues is a mercifully short, though seemingly not short enough, narratively inept and technically laughable “believe in magic” kids flick that’s insufferably dull at worst and B-movie grade unintentionally funny at best.

I probably wouldn’t hold so much venom towards it if I had stumbled upon it flipping through network television channels on a Saturday afternoon 15 years ago but the notion that this was constructed and released as it was today and released to theaters is more than a little bit irritating.

Pushing me closer to the territory of homicidal rage is the revelation that apparently, the distribution rights to this thing was bought by Netflix, with a special deal by the production company cut with AMC Theaters to give it a brief and limited theatrical distribution, meaning that somebody higher up knew that this was direct to video trash at best that I should probably be featuring on my direct to video B-movie focused series, yet still decided to milk as many theatrical dollars out of audiences as possible.

The only reason I didn’t lose money out of the deal was because I got into the screening via perks with my membership to AMC’s A-List Rewards program.

I’m still debating a refund from them to compensate for the time I wasted on something they had to have known was worthless.

3 Drowning Sirens out of 10