Descendants (2015)

  This is the Christy pick for June, also her birthday.  Yay!

In the Disney universe, Belle (Keegan Connor Tracy) married the Beast (Dan Payne) and banished all the villains to the Isle of the Lost, surrounded by a magical barrier from which they can not escape.  All is well and good until their son, Ben (Mitchell Hope), decides to extend a goodwill gesture toward the children of the island and invites four of them to attend the same school as the "good" children.  Maleficent (Kristin Chenoweth) sees this as the perfect opportunity to get some revenge and tells her daughter, Mal (Dove Cameron), to steal the wand belonging to the Fairy Godmother (Melanie Paxson) as soon as she can.  Mal and the other three children are initially committed to the plan but soon learn that the outside world is not exactly what they have been told by their parents.

This is a Disney Channel original movie, with all that entails.  Obviously, it has been many years since I had an inclination to watch anything  on that channel and I'm not the target audience by any stretch.  It's a cute concept, and I understand the reasoning.  Most of the classic Disney movies came out either before I was born or during my childhood.  Kids today need something of their own, a fresh way to connect to these characters.

That being said, I found myself nonplussed by the film.  It just felt so half-assed.  They didn't even give the kids real names, just shorted versions of their parents'.  And no one explained exactly how the villains ended up with children.  Who lines up to fuck Maleficent?  Well, okay, me but that's just so I can steal her power.  And who lets Jafar have custody?  The female characters I get, the baby comes from them so they just keep it, but who slept with Jafar and thought "you know, my child should be with his father"?

The plot is very predictable and the musical numbers were a little lacking in imagination but the choreography was excellent and so were the costumes.  Kenny Ortega directed so these are givens.  He also did the directing for Newsies and is most famous for the choreography of Dirty Dancing.  If you have teens, they probably enjoyed this.  I just wish it had a little more to offer.