A Wrinkle in Time * (2018, Storm Reid, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine) – Movie Review

Director Ava DuVernay’s Disney kids and early-teen movie for easily entertained girls is embarrassingly awful, with a shamelessly manipulative and sentimental screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based upon the novel by Madeleine L’Engle. It plays like a throwback to an old-school Disney movie from their bad old live-action days – the Sixties or Seventies, maybe. I’d hoped that we may have moved on, but apparently not. Roseanne is back on TV, so the past is always with us, looming large. Or perhaps it is all just A Wrinkle in Time. I’ve no idea what that means, by the way.

Top billed stars Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling are pretty bad as three witches (‘when shall we three meet again’, they cry – ‘never, we hope’, cry we) who appear from nowhere to help the young heroine find her long-missing dad.

As Mrs Which, Winfrey declares her quasi-significant lines importantly and grandly, with great regal majesty, but it is all silly stuff, pretending to have life-enhancing significance. As Mrs Whatsit, Witherspoon tries to play a campy, fun comedy turn, and falls on her behind. As Mrs Who, Kaling gets by best by having least to do, and doing it very discreetly, so that you hardly notice her.

You can’t blame the kids – Storm Reid as the feisty young heroine Meg, Levi Miller as her troubled friend Calvin and Deric McCabe as her little brother Charles Wallace – they are eager to please and do what’s asked of them nicely enough, actually more than nicely enough. As the film is really about them, it is good that they are good.

Chris Pine picks another turkey to appear in, and guess what?, he’s pretty bad too, as the Storm and Deric’s scientist dad, who has inexplicably vanished four years earlier, but that’s OK ‘cos those ghastly weird old hags send Meg, her brother and her friend out into space to find him. Just when things are going really badly, along comes Zach Galifianakis as Happy Medium and Michael Peña as Red. To be fair, Gugu Mbatha-Raw is sweet and charming as the kids’ mom Mrs Murry and André Holland gives a decent, concerned performance as the kids’ school Principal Jenkins.

Bellamy Young plays Camazotz Woman, or Comatoze Woman. I know how she feels. Sitting in the freezing Odeon Covent Garden, I felt like I’d gone through a Wrinkle in Time, where time stands still and 109 minutes seems like an eternity, or that I’d been away from home for four years, and it was taking for ever but my loved ones had finally managed to rescue me. The only wrinkle I got in this time was one deeply etched on my brow that is going to take a fair amount of moisturiser to smooth out.

The cheap-looking visual effects are poor, unimaginative and ugly, the costumes are plain and ugly, and the score is over-blown and ugly. What I did like was the arrival at a late stage of a surreal element to the movie when the kids land on whatever place in space it is. It looks good here. Though just why the kids, especially Meg, have to go to wherever this is to find dad, why he’s there, or how they get back to Squaresville on Planet Earth, I haven’t an earthly.

A Wrinkle in Time is not about that. It’s about boldly going and being true to yourself and other daft cliched nonsense like that. Oprah Winfrey declares all this sort of stuff like she really believes it. I do hope not. Or maybe she is a better actress here than I thought, and it is not such a bad performance after all.

The film is targeted at audiences between the ages of Charles Wallace, who is six, and child actress Storm Reid, who is 14. Like I said, it is a throwback to an old-school Disney movie.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com