The Little Mermaid is a 30-year-old boat leaking from countless holes patched up with tar. While on the surface the movie is incredibly dull in its mostly straightforward copy-and-paste of the animated film into a live-action format, the exercise in "fixing" the original is horrible in ways that I still struggle with expressing.

They've aged up Ariel, they've made her life in the sea more democratic (which weirdly makes her seem even more reckless and irresponsible in the ways she abandons her family), and they've deepened the romance between Eric and Ariel by having them connect more meaningfully. I honestly feel like I sound like a crazy person or truly gross for pointing these out, because yeah... many of these things were problematic or weird or worse. One at a time they are indeed changes for the better, but they're all incredibly noticeable and the collective effect of fixing so much with such a short film feels deeply strange, especially with so much of the original film remade so faithfully. We often transition from a flawless visual recreation of the classic song Under the Sea animated brilliantly to a clumsy plot patch. The result is disconcerting.

Like Buffalo Bill's skin suit in Silence of the Lambs or Leatherface's mask from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the emotional impact is a bit like watching someone wear another person's skin. Cracked around the edges, sagging, and falling apart around the frame that it is draping over. If they had leaned into it, really accepted how much they were changing, and truly made a different movie this might have worked better.

Everything else here is fine. The acting is excellent, and the performances are all delivered well, particularly by Halle Bailey and Malisa McCarthy. The songs are fun, the visuals are top-notch. I'll never not love "Kiss the Girl" or "Poor Unfortunate Souls".

I wanted to like this movie. Certainly, it's made an effort to address many of the criticisms that have been aimed at the original over the last 30 years, but maybe we aren't supposed to try to fix the past. The rewriting of something like this is a strange mix of past and present that tastes strangely sour, especially when the movie goes so far out of its way to avoid saying anything about the original story. I would go so far as to call it cowardly. With nothing to say and no reason to exist, the result is as bland as you might think.

Ultimately, my distaste for the movie comes from the comparison to the original, and those who have never seen the 1989 version of the story won't feel the palpable sense of strangeness from the adaptation. But I don't think they'll feel much of anything else, either. It won't ruin your day as it's bad in strange and unique ways rather than the myriad of clumsy boring ways that films are usually bad in, but I believe you can do better and watch something brave enough to have a voice of its own.