101 Dalmatians Reviews

There is a lot to enjoy, especially Glenn Close's near-perfect performance as Cruella DeVil. She was absolutely brilliant here, truly evil, and was clearly having a lot of fun. Hugh Laurie made a memorable appearance as Jasper, and some of his lines are very funny. The scenes in the mansion, were inspired, I think by the Home Alone franchise, and for this sort of film it did work. Jeff Daniels and Joely Richardson are more subdued but deliver very human portrayals of the Dearlys. Joan Plowright was fine also as the nanny. And Michael Kamen's music was lovely. However, I much prefer the animated version to this, and here's why. The dogs were very cute, but nothing they did was particularly interesting. Also the Twilight Bark sequence was lost, and that's what made the animation so poignant. It also isn't as entertaining as the animated version. All in all, an entertaining film, that just lacked the ingredients that made the animated version a masterpiece. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Glenn Close is completely wasted in '101 Dalmatians' a live action movie based on the 1956 novel 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians'. The movie is just boring! This movie wastes not just Close but also Jeff Daniels, Joely Richardson, Joan Plowright, Hugh Laurie and Mark Williams. If only it were more like the Disney movie which actually worked really well!

Honestly, I wasn't expecting much from this flick but since I always had a weak spot for Glenn Close, I thought I might as well give it a try. Indeed, I thought it would be completely lame but I have to admit that there were in fact some good things in this flick. First of all, obviously, Glenn Close gave a rather impressive performance and she completely stole the show everytime she was on the screen. You could easily see that she was having a ball and she completely nailed this part. As a result, she was the main actraction and indeed, the focus was rather put on her than on the dogs. And that was the main issue with this movie, those dogs. Indeed, with the cartoon, thanks to the animation, they were full of expression and life and the makers were able to have some fun with hem. But here, they just look like, well, some dogs. Anyway, in this case, you have to keep in mind that there was definitely a target audience, the young children, and they will definitely like it more than I did. To conclude, I didn't really enjoy it and, if you're grown-up, I don't think it is really worth a look, however, I guess young kids would probably enjoy the damned thing.

Live action remake of the animation. Entertaining in the "look what they can make dogs do with computers now" sense, but not much else. One for the kids, really.

The cartoon was better.