I paid the $29.99 so you don’t have to.
Without getting into the politics of it all, Mulan is reprehensibly bad. If there is justice in the world (artistic, poetic, or otherwise), it would put director Niki Caro, as Sonny Bunch and Jonathan V. Last like to put it, in movie jail for the rest of her life.
Yet, since this got made with the permission and seemingly at the behest of the Chinese government, and because corporate America seems to endorse that sweet, sweet red, gold, sickle, and forced labor these days, here we are.
For those who lived under a rock in the 1990s, Mulan is the story of Hua Mulan volunteering in her father’s place to battle the invading Rouran warriors who seek to unseat the Chinese emperor.
Before I lay out the laundry list of negatives and drawbacks of the remake, I’ll give a hat tip to one point: The movie ends. But only after a grueling, laughably stupid, almost two-hour debacle of an adaptation of the beloved Disney animated classic.
First, whoever at Disney thought Mulan would work well in live action without the songs clearly didn’t understand why the original succeeded. While the score is teased in a few moments and sometimes lyrics are spoken as dialogue, “A Girl Worth Fighting For” and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” do not make an appearance. Cultural revolutions tend to purge out the good parts. And no, ladies, the captain who whips Mulan and company into shape in the cartoon isn’t a shredded stallion of a man in the 2020 iteration.
Worse yet, Eddie Murphy’s Mushu was replaced with a badly animated phoenix, which is tragic because this movie could use some comic relief.
These departures from the original material might have been forgivable if somehow the story had been markedly improved. However, no such luck with the new Mulan. The $200 million budget produced some of the silliest set pieces, oversaturated design, and phoned-in martial arts I’ve seen since I was watching the music videos at a karaoke bar in Fenghuang, China (translation: “phoenix”).
Jackie Chan, with 10 minutes and $20, could have done better. The Mulan “signature chi move” (kicking a moving object to change its trajectory to hit another object or person) is probably cool in some remote part of China, but in the West, we’ve been familiar with this move for a while, thanks to David Beckham.
But what about the story? A young girl rising up to protect her father and overcoming backward Chinese tradition to save the empire! No such luck with any notable improvement on the original story.
The dialogue is so elementary and grammatically peculiar it barely disguises the Chinese censors scribbling bad translations from Mandarin into English. The storyline adaptation of making the invading tribes get assistance from a reluctant witch doesn’t hold up for five seconds, if you think about it.
Maybe audiences were supposed to derive some sort of introspective girl power theme from Mulan, but unlike the live-action Aladdin, this message is as shallow as “she is a witch, Mulan is a witch, feminism.” At one point, when she is discovered as a woman, I wondered if we’d be subjected to a soldier in the Chinese army yelling, “Throw her in the pond and see if she floats!” Gender studies majors at the University of California, Berkeley are going to have a field day unpacking that one over Zoom.
Yifei Liu, when she’s not a puppet for the Chinese Communist Party, plays Mulan so cold and stone-faced that I see why she would gleefully side with the Hong Kong police. I also wondered if she was channeling one of those North Korean cheerleaders for the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics but without the pompoms or enthusiasm. And while I liked Tzi Ma in Tigertail, his dialogue is so dumbed down that it’s a forgettable performance — as are the other characters entirely.
Lastly, the cinematography is horrific. The filming style is chaotic and unfocused, with random camera flips and turns mixed with really poor action sequences. There are a few, well-crafted establishing shots of China from the outer provinces to the salt pillars near Zhangjiajie, but it does make you wonder how much time was spent creating shots that kept the Xinjiang concentration camps out of the background.
There is no reason to buy Disney+ Premier Access to see Mulan — unless you’re comfortable funding a corporatist appeasement project that directly boosts the aims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Tyler Grant (@TyGregoryGrant) is a Young Voices contributor who completed a Fulbright fellowship in Taiwan. He writes movie reviews for the Washington Examiner.
