Cruella de Vil is precisely so scary because her sole goal throughout
One Hundred and One Dalmatians is to make a coat entirely of puppies. It doesn t get more evil than that.
Yet
Cruella decides that it wants to give her a reason for, you know, being a puppy-murderer – which isn t something we can really get behind. For some villains, simply being evil is enough.
Perhaps presciently, this is the tack the movie takes in exploring the character s development. Unfortunately, it leans heavily into the apple doesn t fall far from the tree cliché to explain Estella s transformation into Cruella, which is a lazy shortcut shoe-horned into an otherwise adequate movie.
”Cruella” is the new
Disney live-action film exploring Cruella del Vil – the villain from the animated classic “101 Dalmatians” origin story.
Emma Stone (“La La Land”) stars in the leading role – set in 1970s London during the punk rock revolution, a young grifter named Estella is trying to break into the fashion industry.
She builds a life on the London streets with the help of two young thieves,
Joel Fry (Jasper) and
Paul Walter Hauser (Horace), who appreciate her appetite for mischief. Estella’s flair for fashion catches the eye of fashion legend Baroness von Hellman, played by two-time Oscar winner
Tuesday, 25th May 2021 at 5:34 pm
Disney usually enjoys its pick of Hollywood’s best acting talent when it comes to bringing their live-action productions to life – and that’s the case once again with new origin story Cruella.
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Two Emmas – Stone and Thompson – lead the ensemble as the eponymous villain and her original nemesis, while there’s a long list of other impressive names in the supporting cast. It’s such a starry collective, director Craig Gillespie even tells
RadioTimes.com that, “literally everybody was my first choice”.
Reads on for everything you need to know about the cast, including who they’re playing and where you might have seen them before.
101 Dalmatians origins story
Cruella in February, the internet went into something of a meltdown. The trailer, it was quickly noted, bore a distinct similarity to the one for Todd Phillips s 2019 smash
Joker.
There were the hints of a tormented past resulting in the villain we know and love (to hate) today; the first person voiceover detailing the protagonist s wickedness; snapshots of the nemeses that tipped our anti-heroes over the edge (Baroness Von Hellman for
Cruella, Thomas Wayne for the
Joker); a soundtrack from the golden era of 1950s crooning (Connie Francis s
Who s Sorry Now for
Cruella vs Charlie Chaplin s
Smile); and an overriding sense that we were going to learn a lot more about the titular characters than we ever would while they were playing second fiddle to the heroes of the movies we have seen them in before.