The Witches (2020)

Director: Robert Zemeckis. Writers: Robert Zemeckis (screenplay by), Kenya Barris (screenplay by). Stars: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci.

Bottom line: With its thin plot and Anne Hathaway's rough character, I don't think I would recommend The Witches but the music had its moments.

1.5/4

Witches, the movie explains via Chris Rock narration (really it's frame narrative but it serves the same purpose), hate children. The goal of a witch is to squish children. Thus begins a story of a boy's experience with a witch.

For the bottom line, I was torn between the above and "Meh, I say, meh." There were some pleasant notes but The Witches had a couple glaring issues for me. Even for a kids' movie, the plot was pretty thin. Surely there are some examples of kids' movies with some complexity. I mean, at one point Hero Boy (Jahzir Bruno) is dropped into a dangerous situation and says, "You know [after this happened] I haven't been afraid of things anymore." I'm watching the movie again as I'm writing this and I don't think they establish that fear was his issue. He was sad because his parents were killed in a car crash but not fearful. And they didn't talk about his newfound courage either after that. It felt like it was justification for action situations in which no 8-year old could be expected to function.

Now, plot aside, Bruno's performance was perfectly good. Child actors can be iffy sometimes but he played it well. Octavia Spencer's performance as Grandma was awesome. She's is a wonderfully positive character and she is tough and supportive of Hero Boy. Heck, give me a coming of age tale with the two of them and I'd be happy. I love Stanley Tucci and it's a shame that his role in The Witches was so small. Anne Hathaway's performance as the Grand High Witch (the character as a whole too), well, squished the movie. 

We learn pretty early on that the Grand High Witch is serious business; she was hatched in an egg somewhere in like Norway - queue Hathaway's ever-changing accent. She cycles between an unintelligible growl to German to the Swedish Chef. It seems like they substituted a character for CGI to make her look like a witch, which (ha), was actually a little creepy for a kids' movie. 

The introduction of the film (witches = bad) is really the extent of witch character development. Where do they get their powers? What powers do they have? Where do they come from? Why is witch magic bad but voodoo ok? Aside from the few positive performances, there were other positive notes.  

Music was pleasant at times. As the little mice were running along, the music complemented the cute little scurrying. The graphics were also pretty fancy. A major portion of the movie was centered on CGI talking mice a la Stuart Little. If ever there was a movie to date me and my point of reference... Maybe it could be like The Chipmunks but I'm not sure because I never saw that one. Anyway, fancy graphics.

So, overall, The Witches was meh. There are some pleasant enough parts but they don't do enough to carry the movie. If you're out of Halloween movies to watch but need to see something this week, maybe, but you won't be missing out if you don't see it. I wonder how it compares to the original 1990 version. My wife and I saw part of that late at night at a hotel and we've never gone back to it.

Alright, from here on out mind yourself of some spoilers so if you happen to see The Witches already, read on!

Let's start off with a big one, the choice to not turn Hero Boy back into a boy. Hero Boy and his friends are turned into mice and they go to the grandma for help. She opens up her travel voodoo pack to try to "reverse engineer" the curse in a hotel, mind you. She isn't able to and that's that? So then they go and decide not to find another witch and get them to reverse engineer it but to turn all the witches into rats. Alright, fine, but why did they have to add the note about him having a significantly shorter lifespan? That part never occurred to me. Along with that, do we not see his friends at the end because they died of old age? That feels depressing.

On another note, I sat in on a virtual seminar about Diversity in Videogames. A couple of the speakers said that growing up, they watched Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. They enjoyed the shows but never saw the main characters that looked like them. So with that in mind, it's cool that The Witches had a Black protagonist and family. The movie is set in the '60s in Alabama so, to be honest, I was a little worried about if they would come across any racism. They didn't which was probably a good thing for a kids' movie but that isn't to say that race wasn't a part of the movie. There were a couple things that stuck out to me; first, they decided to go to this fancy hotel because "only rich white folks go there" so they'd be safe from witches who only prey on the poor. Second, when they get to the hotel, all of the staff are Black and one expresses a brief surprise that Grandma is arriving to stay at the hotel.

Alright, that's all I've got to say about The Witches. Have you seen this movie or the original? What did you think of either?

Thanks for reading! 

Edit: As a side note, I tried installing Grammarly to help me, well, with my grammar. It has a new (to me) feature that predicts tone. It says the post is disapproving!