The plot needs no further retelling here—the original “Mulan,” while no classic, left a lasting impression on a generation of girls who took inspiration from the dutiful daughter overcoming her fears to become a formidable warrior. The new version, directed by Niki Caro—her 2002 “Whale Rider” was a wonderful story of female empowerment—retains the essential structure, though Mulan has acquired a younger sister, to no purpose, plus a supernatural adversary in the shape-shifting person of a witch played doggedly, if gamely, by the legendary Gong Li. No one breaks out in song—hardly a surprise, given the film’s realism and darker tone. And regrettably, though inevitably, Mushu is a no-show. Like other creatures tied to a specific time and medium, the exuberant little dragon, voiced in the cartoon by Eddie Murphy, has gone extinct. Mulan’s new protector, and her connection to her ancestors, is a phoenix, readily mistaken for a kite, that materializes every now and then to guide her way.
Mulan as a child is played charmingly by Crystal Rao in a preface that quivers with Disney didacticism. Her parents keep admonishing her to control herself, even though she has a gift of acrobatic flight that should thrill them, or at least pique their curiosity. “Your chi is strong,” says her father, “but chi is for warriors, not daughters,” meaning “hide that gift, girl, because it won’t help you handle a husband.”
Soon the older Mulan, played by Liu Yifei, finds herself tarted up like a Chinese-opera walk-on for a tutorial in domesticity conducted by a harridan matchmaker. It’s a delightful sequence, beautifully shot and full of witty details, that would spell the heroine’s doom if she didn’t have other plans—namely going off to fight nomad invaders as a conscript subbing for her father, whose leg was injured in a previous war, while masquerading as a man among mostly dopey male recruits. (The cinematographer was Mandy Walker.) What follows is basic training that goes on too long, as it does in many movies, mixed with broad comedy that turns on Mulan not only concealing her gender but trying to hide her chi while using it to survive and then some. She’s a martial-arts prodigy among gangly hayseeds.
That’s fine, as far as it goes, a pleasant enough prelude to Mulan’s trial by combat, which constitutes the movie’s core. But Ms. Caro is the filmmaker who made movie magic on a modest scale with “Whale Rider,” which was based on a Maori myth. When I reviewed it almost two decades ago I described the filmmaker as an acrobat in her own right with a “gift for walking a loose, swaying rope between the solemn and the absurd, the mystical and the mundane.” That’s not what she’s been able to do in this huge industrial enterprise, beset as she must have been by daunting logistics and circumscribed by a mundane script credited to Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Elizabeth Martin and Lauren Hynek.
Instead, she and her army of artistic and technical collaborators (the live action is supplemented by digital wizardry) have made a movie of moments. A few of them are enriched by spectacle—the heroine emerging as the force she was meant to be—and others are graced by Ms. Liu’s performance during quiet passages when Mulan is summoning up her courage, or touched by love she can’t express.
Still, the film as a whole lacks the clarity of its animated predecessor, not to mention the earlier version’s gleeful showmanship, gorgeous design and vastly wider emotional range. Mulan in her first incarnation may have seemed a bit flippant from time to time, and sounded more Californian than Chinese, yet she was endearingly funny and bursting with passion. “Mulan” redux takes its feminism more seriously, but its spirit is heavy, its chi is weak.
Source: Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern