Not even Luke Evans, who gives the most energetic and ebullient performance, can navigate Gaston’s change from comic-dramatic brute to militaristic bully as laid out in this film’s prosaic scenes. Gaston, the lout who wants to marry her, is not just a champion hunter but also a thickheaded war hero. But this Belle is more about Virtue than Wit-or Beauty. She is funny when singing that she finds the Beast’s attractiveness “alarming,” and she is touching when she lifts her arms up shoulder-high to dance with him. Pleasant and almost impossibly pretty, she occasionally gets off a mischievous delivery of a line or lyric or an instinctive gesture. I loved Watson in the Harry Potter films and in My Week with Marilyn and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (written and directed by Chbosky), but here she appears to have poured her passion into insuring the political correctness of her role. Belle (Emma Watson), the beautiful village bookworm, now invents a primitive washing machine to give herself more time to read, then scandalizes her neighbors with her advocacy of female education. Screenwriters Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos have contributed revamps and additions that come off as heavy-handed editorial doodles. Bill Condon’s live-action remake of Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), the high point of Disney’s animation renaissance, is as bloated, awkward, and aggressive as the cartoon feature is fleet and graceful. David Bowie once sang, “You can’t say no to the Beauty and the Beast.” He might have changed his tune if he’d lived to see the latest Disney extravaganza.
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