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Damsel review – Millie Bobby Brown goes Rambo in diverting Netflix adventure
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 8 March - 20:10 · 1 minute
The Stranger Things star isn’t always convincing as a princess fighting for her life, but there’s some fun to be had from this rousing subversion of storybook tropes
Taking age-old expectations of how a fairytale is supposed to play out and giving them a brisk shuffle is by no means as fresh as some film-makers often like to think, upending cliches with a tired wink and a smug smirk. But Netflix’s Damsel, itself loosely similar to Hulu’s 2022 offering The Princess , doesn’t require our astonishment at its wheel reinvention to pass the bar and is far too sprightly to get overly bogged down in the self-satisfaction of such an endeavour.
There are, in fact, very few surprises in store here – perhaps Fast X writer Mazeau’s script could have benefitted from a few – but there’s a simple, mechanical satisfaction to watching an underdog fight her way back from the depths, driven by a familiar current of revenge. For Elodie (Netflix’s in-house leading lady Millie Bobby Brown), her journey starts in a different kind of strife. Her family, led by father (Ray Winstone) and stepmother (Angela Bassett) are struggling and so are her people, in need of a miracle to save them. It magically arrives as an offer of marriage, a handsome prince from a far away kingdom (Nick Robinson) wants to make her his wife, steered by a strong-willed queen (Robin Wright). But her happy ending is in fact an unhappy beginning, the wedding part of an ancient ritual that sees her hurled into a cave, sacrificed to a dragon. Romance curdles into horror as Elodie must scramble back to safety.
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