‘Little Mermaid’ review: Another magic-free live-action Disney remake

Look at this stuff. Isn’t it neat?

Ariel’s lyric in the song “Part of Your World” from “The Little Mermaid” could describe Disney’s reliably heartless approach to their live-action remakes of cherished cartoons. 

They’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty. They’ve got whosits and whatsits galore. You want thingamabobs? They’ve got 20 million.

But who cares? No big deal. We want more!

Despite real actors, CGI and brand-new material, “Mermaid” is the studio’s latest flesh-and-blood cash grab that’s more lifeless than far better two-dimensional painted drawings.

The magic and soul of the studio’s animated classics never, ever translate to this colder, realistic context, and still they keep churning them out.   

Why learn their lesson? “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast” both grossed over $1 billion. The movies don’t need to be high-quality, because the titles and logos do the heavy-lifting for them. 

While director Rob Marshall (“Chicago”) and writer David Magee make enough prudent changes to ensure their musical film functions efficiently, many alterations seem to exist only to achieve a bloated two-hour length or to wedge Lin-Manuel Miranda’s name into the end credits.

For instance, when a smitten Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) takes speechless Ariel (Halle Bailey) around his island kingdom, the Caribbean carriage ride is more of the “Gilligan’s Island” length — a three-hour tour. 

That’s one of many middling efforts to deepen the prince’s character from just a smile on legs. We also are pointlessly told that he is adopted, and not of royal blood, lazily implying Eric is somehow more in-tune to the plight of the common man.   

Early on, Hauer-King sings a new time-waster easy-listening ballad from Alan Menken and Miranda called “Wild Uncharted Waters” that, unlike the title claim, is behaved and well-tread, though watery indeed.

And the bland music doesn’t stop there. Awkwafina as Scuttle the seagull and Daveed Diggs (“Hamilton”) as Sebastian, the crab, squawk an annoying and out-of-place rap called “The Scuttlebutt” that should’ve been scuttled.

Even with all the clammy filler, the plot of “The Little Mermaid” is mostly the same as the perfect 1989 animated film — only it plays much worse as live-action. 

Ariel again lives in the ocean with her father King Triton (Javier Bardem, barely awake) and her six sisters, and dreams of frolicking on land with fin-and-tail-less people.

After she rescues Prince Eric from drowning and falls in love, the mermaid makes a deal with evil Ursula, the sea witch (Melissa McCarthy), to become human in exchange for her voice. If she can’t get Eric to kiss her in three days, she goes back under the sea and belongs to Ursula forever.

Magenta McCarthy puts a brassy spin on the cruel squid and behaves in the boozy, loudmouth style of Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Her take is admirably different, but a bit much and not nearly as frightening as Pat Carroll’s vocal performance in the original.

Ursula is handed another significant story change, surely meant to satisfy today’s savvier kids. The sorceress now casts a secret spell that makes Ariel forget she needs to kiss the prince at all. 

Huh? It’s weird, yes, but the fine print adds a helpful challenge. Two gorgeous people making out in a mostly empty castle once in 72 hours is not exactly climbing Mount Everest, and suspension of disbelief is much easier with a cartoon.

So is presenting otherwise creepy scenarios. Even with Bailey and Hauer-King’s churchly chemistry, it is somewhat off-putting during “Kiss the Girl” to see this guy have the hots for someone who can’t communicate and clearly doesn’t know what a goat or a fork is. 

Both actors are likable given the constraints. Bailey radiates a guileless presence and has a sweet voice that’s just Disney enough, but with modern pop flair. However, it’s challenging to make an impression in a role that’s mostly quiet grinning. 

To combat the fact that she’s mute for half the movie, Menken and Miranda wrote Ariel a song called “For the First Time” — after she loses her voice — that exists only in her imagination. It’s another clunker that doesn’t hold a candle to what Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman so winningly achieved in 1989.

What irritates me most, however, are the animals. Not due to the skill of the voice actors (Diggs comes off best of anybody in this), but because their National Geographic appearance exemplifies what’s wrong with these movies.

Nobody wants to watch realistic flounders and tasty-looking crabs rap and crack jokes as their fish mouths barely move. Yet that’s what we poor unfortunate souls get.