“Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” takes a good premise with fantastic actors and wastes them on a poorly thought out plot. The movie has all of the essentials for an enjoyable movie at minimum, but is poorly hashed out and riddled with inconsistencies.

The set design was absolutely breathtaking. This was a very crucial part of the movie, as the story takes place in supposedly awe-inspiring places. The sets were very detailed and vibrant, drawing in the audience with intricacy and creativity. 

The costume design was also fairly well done. For the most part, the outfits did their job; they enhanced the movie without taking too much of the focus from the characters and the plot. However, a couple of the costumes were hypersexualized, detracting from the scenes they appeared in. 

The shots were mostly great, taking full advantage of the incredible set and actors. Almost all of the scenes used color well and the shots were surprisingly creative for the cookie-cutterness of the rest of the movie. However, there were a few scenes where there was a lack of color and it was noticeably jarring and distracting from the plot. 

The film was comprised of impressive acting and had decent characters, though most of that work was accomplished by the first movie. Elle Fanning (Aurora), Harris Dickinson (Prince Phillip) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Queen Ingris) were fantastic. Angelina Jolie (Maleficent) also performed spectacularly for the most part. However, her delivery on a few of her lines bared no emotion. Sam Riley (Diaval) was a highlight, providing some much needed comedic relief in such an emotionally heavy movie. There were a few actors whose delivery fell flat, but they had smaller parts overall. A number of the characters, however, were poorly fleshed out, no matter how well they acted, most notably the queen’s character, who had very little depth. 

The worst part of “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” is the abysmal plot. The whole thing felt like a rough draft of a movie that accidentally made it to the big screen. There are countless character inconsistencies, some of which are significant enough that they actually drive the entire plot. There is obviously lazy writing displayed in the stream of convenient coincidences that occur to get the characters where they need to be.

On top of all this, the main story behind it all is extremely similar to the first movie. There are some interesting metaphors and parallels in the movie that, if the rest of the plot hadn’t been so poorly thought out, might have been really interesting. However, because there are so many gaping holes in the quality of the script, these decent bits and pieces got buried.

I would not recommend this movie to most people, because the plot is so lacking. The movie is not the most enjoyable to watch and considering the price of movies today, it’s really not worth it to go and see a forced rehashing of the original movie.

“Maleficent: Mistress of Evil”: ★★☆☆☆