[5.8/10] When I cued this up, I had no idea that Disney released this movie. In some ways, it makes sense, since Disney’s done iconic adaptations of many of the stories at the center of the film. The studio has been subverting its own classics for years, so even the more deconstructive bent of the story isn’t necessarily a bad fit for The Mouse.

But in others, it’s a strange choice, one that hints toward some of the film’s real problems. Because the stage show of *Into the Woods* contains some genuine bite. Without making this review one long comparison, the critique of and introspection over fairy tale stories is much sharper and more cutting in the play. There’s death and infidelity and genuine moral gray areas that make Sondheim’s musical a strange bird for Disney to try to cage and sell.

The result is a movie that feels like it has its edges sanded down. You can’t fully neutralize the deconstruction within *Into the Woods*, even in a glossy Hollywood production. Questions of what’s truly right and wrong, notions of the distance between fantasy and reality, and the impact of the stories we tell to children all permeate the subtext (and often the text) of the film, even as it’s been rubberized.

And yet, blindings are glanced over, deaths are taken in stride, and the truly subversive parts of the movie are, if not elided, then certainly presented much more gently. There is, of course, an action scene in the climax, because why not? Some songs are cut. Others seem more chipper. Disney and director Rob Marshall don’t necessarily neuter the film, but they do take a great deal of the fight out of it.

More damagingly, everything in the film seems flat and sterile. While deaths still happen, the reactions to them tend to be muted. Betrayals and narrative turns still take place, but the whole film is so emotionally uninvolving that they leave you waiting for the next indiscriminate scene to pop up rather than feeling the moment. The entire movie seems like it’s holding the audience at a distance, enjoying the narrative’s themes in theory but never really engaging with the truth of them in a more visceral way.

That extends to the look of the thing. *Into the Woods* isn’t quite at the heart of the studio’s live action remake frenzy, but it follows the same visual trends of a sort of unreal, soulless CGI projection onto everything. Nothing you see here feels genuine, which is an approach that can work for a fairy tale story, even a subversive one. The problem is that the whole thing comes off as so cold, with omnipresent gray color grading and samey backdrops that drain the life out of a dark but still vibrant tale.

It also extends to the performers. Very little of the acting here is memorable or effective. The bulk of the cast is forgettable in their roles, which is a major hindrance to an ensemble picture like this. It’s particularly true for James Corden as The Baker, whose everyman schtick leaves him practically fading into the background. Even the unimpeachable Meryl Streep basically does some generic witch vamping and calls it a day, given little in the way of means to elevate the material that Marshall’s made a hash of.

The two exceptions are Emily Blunt as The Baker’s Wife and Chris Pine as The Crown Prince. The former carries the satirical edge of the source material in her performance, reflecting both light and darkness in moments big and small. She handles the musical material well, presaging her later turn as Mary Poppins, and there’s a dimensionality to her acting here that’s missing elsewhere.

The same can’t be said for Pine exactly, but he expertly plays the empty veneer of a prince, channeling more than a little of the Shatnerian blowhard persona that tastefully eschews in other roles. He overacts to an extent, but in a way that’s calibrated to the character he plays -- someone textually charming but not sincere.

Unfortunately, the rest of *Into the Woods* can’t seem to manage either. The film’s music becomes exhausting at some point. The singing is clearly ADR’d in, which gives it an anodyne quality like so much else in the movie. Beyond that, while the musical’s best songs still stand out, without more breaks in the action, Sondheim’s trademark patter-y style begins to grate and his tunes fade together.

Frankly, the same goes for the storylines. While *Into the Woods* was a fairytale mosaic from the beginning, the stage play has more of a structure and sense of momentum among the different plothreads. Here, by contrast, the intersecting tales of the Baker family, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and others are just sort of smashed together in what feels like one long scene in the same general location. That leaves the movie playing like a hodgepodge of different moments haphazardly stitched together rather than the intricate weave it’s meant to be.

That too saps the film of power. In addition to hints of bowdlerization, it’s hard to connect with anyone or anything in this adaptation. The characters are thinly sketched and just when one of their stories is getting going, Marshall and company jump to somebody else’s, leaving the whole thing feeling threadbare.

*Into the Woods* remains a story worth telling. Deconstructing the fairy tales that have permeated western culture for centuries, and which Disney itself has repackaged and reimagined for generations, is a worthy project. Sondheim’s original, somewhat out of date though it may be, still has a force in the way it looks at the distance between our real lives and our cultural myths, and what values those myths subtly or not-so-subtly convey.

But this movie botches the exchange in most respects. The end result is a workmanlike, boring but competent rendition of the original work. And yet, under Marshall’s direction and Disney’s aegis, the parts of the presentation that shock or engross or challenge the audience are all watered down to a dull, gentle suggestion.