Rent Matilda the Musical (2022)

Oh dear - Matilda the Musical review by TH

First thing to be clear I knew this was based on a mix of the book and the musicial. I have read the book and seem the musicial.

That being said this is really bad film. Something about this just didn't click. It was if they had a tick list of events they needed to include and handled it badly.

The most surprising issue was the acting. Emma Thompson, Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough are fantastic actors but it seemed very pantomime in delivery.

It's hard when watching not to think I could be watching the 90s film instead. Pam Ferris was so memorable in that film and made the film feel more authentic. Sadly as a stage musicial you can forgive the breaking into song but as a film it falls flat.

Overall just not for me.

Every Song the same - Matilda the Musical review by CG

Emma Thompson is great. That’s where the positive ends, oh actually I could add Stephen Graham to the positives. Other than that, every song sounds the same and the main actress’s voice really grates. There is no colour or gear changes in this dreadful adaptation of a fabulous book. 

Emma Thompson saves the day in sanitised version of Dahl - Matilda the Musical review by PD

There's some good moments in this adaptation of the now-famous musical, and includes a fabulous turn from Emma Thompson as the tyrannical Turnbull, but ultimately, as with the stage adaptation itself, it rather fails to do justice to the world as conceived by Road Dahl (something captured rather better in Danny DeVito’s 1998 live-action film adaptation). For by favouring a cleaner, more straightforward portrait of Matilda and highlighting its undeniably catchy and clever songs, this is at the expense of more complex reckonings with education, revolution, cruelty, and love, that you'd think are just waiting to be dusted off the page. Matthew Warchus holds close many elements from his stage creation, but this ends up being part of the problem (the great chocolate-eating scene for example is drowned in a mass of schoolchildren rotating in magenta-sequinned blazers, and at times it does feel you're watching the UK’s hottest new dance troupe on “Britain’s Got Talent.”). It’s also a shame that the obsession with television is totally ignored, and that the prospect of revolution is fully watered down, or, by contrast, reducing the parents to pantomime villains, which of course merely weakens the comedy. Meanwhile, Alisha Weir is all a bit too one-dimensional for me, for the real conflict Matilda’s qualities — talent, intelligence, emotional threshold — are subjected to is rather lost amongst all the song and dance routines.

And yet, and yet, enter stage right Emma Thompson. Underneath the fake nose and enormous pentagonal jawline, it’s a fully molecular metamorphosis that sings in ways every other part of the film pretty much falls short on. Thompson is fully convincing in displaying Trunchbull’s rage and resentment, reining in the pathetic comedy when fear takes priority, and cleverly sailing that thin line between comedy and horrific, outright abuse. The performance certainly saves the day, but ultimately this is a sanitised reproduction of the source material.