[This review contains story spoilers! As this site seems to lack a spoiler feature, you've been warned!] --- This is kinda a hard one to judge, especially if it's more a 50 or 60 one. First off, why my initial impression was positive: Visually, the movie is great. Lovely light effects, very nice-looking clothes, beautiful metal and wood. There's an early scene involving stained glass windows, and it looks really lovely. - Sadly, the story doesn't live up to it. The main story and characters are a very blatant mix of stuff you already know. The whole beginning between Rusland and Mila is Disney's Aladdin. And not just a bit. The strong-willed, independent princess that doesn't wanna get married and runs from the palace, the poor guy that pretends to be someone he isn't and has to fight the palace guards and then rescue the princess abducted by the evil wizard. Yeah... Mila is basically Princess Jasmin most of the time, but also adds some parts of Merida and Rapunzel. But of course most fantasy things are inspired by the same fairy tales, right? But still, too many things here are disconnected from each other and seem highly "random". A cat-man with a totally unnecessary fight sequence, a villain that quickly becomes a laughing-stock where one wonders how he was able to win against so many others before, and some moments that are just...strange. The bridge handle needs to be turned by a hamster with beans in his mouth? The gigantic STONE monster can be sliced by a sword? The epic hero with the magic swords decides it's fine for him and his friend to die because his potential girlfriend doesn't like him? What the?! Oh, yeah, as usual, the romance is as believable and hurried like the one between Anna and Hans in Frozen. The movie has many nice parts. As said, the visuals are lovely. The bird sidekick is fun and some of the visual gags are really nice. But overall it lacks cohesion and has too many "what the....why?!" moments. The samurai-style fight against the cake was fun, though.
