It’s hard not to love a movie that introduces Emma Stone to the opening notes of “She’s a Rainbow” by the Rolling Stones while she …
It’s hard not to love a movie that introduces Emma Stone to the opening notes of “She’s a Rainbow” by the Rolling Stones while she aggressively brushes her teeth. That’s what Cruella — which is coming to theaters and Disney+ with Premier Access on Friday (May 28)—does best: take full advantage of Stone’s remarkable talent for playing an unhinged soon-to-be baddie, and pair those talents with a boatload of popular classic rock songs. Even if you go in determined to have a bad time, you’ll be won over by the Stone (or Stones) of it all. In terms of the Disney “canon,” Cruella doesn’t make much sense as a prequel. In the 1996 live-action movie 101 Dalmatians, the villainous Cruella de Vil (played by Glenn Close, a producer on Cruella) is a sadistically evil, obscenely rich old woman who intends to literally murder puppies so that she can make a coat out of their fur. Cruella —directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara—does some creative rejiggering to make Cruella a morally ambiguous, working-class, punk-rock orphan instead. You see, Stone’s version of Cruella—whose real name is Estella—has anger issues. Estella’s mom urges her daughter to suppress her angry “Cruella” side, but then mom dies being mauled by Dalmatians (yes, really). So Estella joins a duo of petty thieves, Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), who one day decide to help her achieve her dream of becoming a fashion designer. Estella gets a job as a cleaner at a prestigious fashion house, and eventually gets hired by the ruthless designer Baroness von Hellman ( Emma Thompson).
