'The Little Mermaid' review: Newcomer Halle Bailey shines in lush remake

Disney’s recent remakes of its animated classics have been box-office gold, though they have yet to surpass or even rival the originals. “The Jungle Book,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” — these 21st-century re-dos could be visually dazzling, yet they lacked a certain magic. The latest, “The Little Mermaid,” mostly follows suit, but it has something the other movies didn’t: A young star who can truly light up a screen.

The title role of Ariel goes to Halle Bailey, a little-known pop singer when her casting was announced in 2019. Bailey turns out to be a winning choice: fresh-faced and radiant, with eyes so big and limpid they could have been drawn by one of Disney’s legendary Nine Old Men. And Bailey’s got pipes: Her soaring voice on Ariel’s signature ballad, “Part of Your World,” is positively spine-tingling.

Bailey has good company: Javier Bardem is her loving but human-hating father, King Triton, and Melissa McCarthy relishes her role as Ursula, the wicked octopoid witch who steals Ariel’s voice and sends her topside to get a kiss from her two-legged crush, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King). Ariel’s animal friends are rendered in photorealistic form using motion-capture actors: Jacob Tremblay as Flounder, a lively Awkwafina as the dopey seabird Scuttle and Daveed Diggs (doing a lilting Trinidadian accent) as the loyal crab Sebastian. The latter two perform “The Scuttlebutt,” a swift little rap number; it’s one of three new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda and original songwriter Alan Menken.

“The Little Mermaid” is extravagantly decorated, stunningly dressed (by costume designer Colleen Atwood) and technologically astounding. Director Rob Marshall (“Chicago”) turns the ocean into a zero-gravity playland in which the actors — live torsos with CGI fishtails — whirl and drift hypnotically. Realism, though, has its limitations. Take “Under the Sea,” the Oscar-winning calypso ditty originally performed by snail saxophonists and crustacean percussionists. Real creatures obviously can’t do that — so Marshall merely parades them around in Busby Berkeley-esque formations (actually choreographed by the Alvin Ailey Foundation). The effect is beautiful, to be sure, but repetitive.

Anti-woke moviegoers might be triggered by two tweaks to the material. The romantic number “Kiss the Girl” apparently struck some as insufficiently consensual (odd, since the girl desperately wanted that kiss), so the new lyrics encourage Eric to “Use your words, boy, and ask her.” Along the same lines, Ursula’s menacing song “Poor Unfortunate Souls” has dropped any lines commanding Ariel to be quiet, lest girls in the audience feel silenced. Alright, but Ursula is the villain — if she can’t send the wrong message, what’s the point of her?

Whatever those changes may or may not achieve, they don’t detract much, either. “The Little Mermaid” is generally lovely to behold. Like its predecessors, though, it’s no match for the original.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman