The School for Good and Evil Review

Blanket bores and binary opposites feature immediately in The School for Good and Evil. As black and white and dense as the world Paul Feig has created here is, it never used to be quite like that. Netflix hammers home that simplicity and unfortunately such Levi Strauss-supporting ineffectuality is here to stay. Opening well enough with a fight scene mired by a succession of slow-motion shots, the last thing The School for Good and Evil needs is a slowing of the pace, especially when it clocks in at the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Mighty running times to give the best of the Hollywood bunch their fair share of screentime.

Still, the allure of an infinite Netflix cash supply must be insatiable. They have a budget to burn with such vaguely inspired characters and costumes. It is somewhat similar to Fable III, a game that falsified choice by having a blanket case of yes or no. Horrendous CGI opens this film, and naturally, closes it too. A battle of horribly dullard proportions that, even with this star power experience, relies on plot points striving forward with absolute banality and complete inoffensiveness. Evil won’t lose, a villain at the heart, all the usual bits and pieces and so flatly directed too. Quick scenes of text strike up a story elsewhere and, inevitably, they’ll connect together as all these flatlining fairytale woes do.

There is a staged depreciation to The School for Good and Evil. It may have range and scope to it, but it is a completely empty piece. There is no depth to the characters, the setting, the scenery. Nothing here strikes up something unique, and if Feig is attempting to double down on what makes the classics of fairytale wisdom so good, then he has failed at that also. Nobody stands out against the washed-up lack of clarity that comes through so frequently. Questionable narrative decisions play out alongside lacklustre acknowledgements of this lacking scale and scope. Feig does little to battle back against the filtered and horribly dull performances within. There is a density and clutter that just doesn’t provide much life in The School for Good and Evil. Not even Toxic can provide much life, although why and for what reason Britney Spears’ music makes an appearance is unknowable.

For all the good and evil on display, the real villain is just how drab this Feig project is. Some sketchy plot elements and a horribly childish style to its aesthetics which blur a rejection of The Chronicles of Narnia with the set designs of Harry Potter. These characters are not smartly designed, they’re just the emo band rejects that were left on the cutting room floor a decade before and Mark Strong wielding a spoon. Good and evil collide in a series of action scenes that belay any real creativity and instead rely on pop riffs, poor CGI and absolutely dreadful performances. It is as unhinged as Tumblr teens would’ve hoped their fan-fiction revisions of Harry Potter would have been should they be greenlit and given several million quid to splash up the wall. In this case, much of the budget appears to have gone on costumes that fail to stand out in any effective or at all interesting way. My Chemical Romance in the costumes, barbaric mediocrity everywhere else.