Into the Woods

Into the Woods (PG)
USA 2014  125 mins  Dir: Rob Marshall  Starring: Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Lilla Crawford, Johnny Depp, Lucy Punch, Mackenzie Mauzy, Frances de la Tour, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Simon Russell Beale, Billy Magnussen, Daniel Huttlestone, Tammy Blanchard

A little Johnny Depp can go an awfully long way, so it’s easy to understand why Chicago director Rob Marshall restricts his screen time in this adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine Grimm mash-up stage musical. But Depp’s leering, hairy-pawed, bushy-tailed Big Bad Paedo Wolf, who drools lasciviously all over precocious Red Riding Hood (Crawford) while crooning “Look at that flesh, pink and plump/Hell-o, little girl!” in his best Leslie Phillips voice, is such great transgressive fun that for once one wishes there was more of him. There are some other amusing turns here too, notably Meryl Streep thoroughly enjoying herself as the wicked witch; Chris Pine as a deliciously insincere Prince Charming, who gets a homoerotic duet with Rapunzel’s prince (Magnussen); and Christine Baranski as a pleasingly vile stepmother.

The Grimm mix’n’match storyline has the witch promising to reverse a curse on a childless baker (Corden) and his wife (Blunt) if they retrieve a trio of maguffins from the woods. Along the way, they run into beanstalky Jack (Huttlestone) and his exasperated mother (Ullman), the imprisoned Rapunzel (Mauzy), and a somewhat disillusioned Cinderella (Kendrick).

Two characters get their eyes pecked out by birds, a third is crushed by a giant, and there’s an amusing scene in which the stepmother carves up her daughters’ (Punch, Blanchard) feet to try and squeeze them into that slipper. But fans of the musical could be disappointed to find that much of the darkness has been toned down to chime with Disney’s current family-friendly live-action fairytale obsession (a new Cinderella will be along in March). The musical-averse attracted by the storyline, meanwhile, may be surprised at the paucity of hummable tunes and will find nothing here to allay the suspicion that the ‘songs’ consist merely of rhyming dialogue delivered in sing-song voices of varying degrees of competence. Structurally, it’s all rather odd too. For an hour and a half, Into the Woods romps along enjoyably enough, having lightly subversive fun with fairytale conventions and wallowing in its self-referentialism (“What am I doing here?” demands the baker’s wife at one point, “I’m in the wrong story”). But when the central quest is over and the yarn has reached its natural conclusion, a further half hour is tacked on filled with a bunch of rote Disney ‘being a better dad’ guff.