On March 8, the fantasy film Maiden vs. Evil was released on Netflix, starring Millie Bobby Brown, star of Netflix’s Stranger Things and Enola Holmes. In this review, we tell how at the time of filming, the 18-year-old actress with a sword as a counterweight faced a fire-breathing dragoness in a dark cave and whether this unequal match was worth the time spent on it.

Pros:

another opportunity to admire Millie Bobby Brown for all her fans; well drawn computer dragon

Cons:

primitivism, which is manifested in everything – from the script efforts and characters to the ridiculous depiction of the main character’s battle with the dragoness

“Diva against trouble” / Damsel

Genre dark phenesis
director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
In roles Millie Bobby Brown, Nick Robinson, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright, Ray Winstone
Premiere Netflix
Graduation year 2024
Site IMDb

The young beauty Elodie is forced to agree to an arranged marriage in order to save her naked, barefoot and categorically impoverished people from inevitable death. Her father, Lord Bayford, stepmother, and younger sister, Floria, arrive in the luxurious and downright fairy-tale kingdom for Elodie to marry the local Prince Henry. In return, the king and queen promise Bayford as much gold as he can shovel.

At first, the friendly hosts seem quite nice people, and the prince can even be called a polite and pleasant guy, and the picturesque area here contrasts sharply with the barren wasteland of his native land. But after the wedding ceremony, Elodie is informed of some ancient, and strange, custom in which she must take part. As a result, the girl, although without pathetic exclamations like “this is Sparta!!!”, is still very unexpectedly thrown into the abyss, where a bloodthirsty fire-breathing dragoness with a tragic past is waiting for her.Already at the beginning, a voice-over proudly informs you that this is not another story about a brave knight in iron armor who saves a defenseless doll from a dragon. In fact, even the Ukrainian version of the name, which in the original sounds simply “Girl”, is the direct antithesis of such an archetypal image in art and, in particular, cinema, as “damsel in distress”. Say no to gender stereotypes! Is anyone against it?

Only here, Millie Bobby Brown destroys these stereotypes by blindly following the examples of masculine action heroes from the past.

She stubbornly chops firewood in the cold, like Rocky Balboa in the snowy Soviet wilderness. Barefoot he makes his way through the narrow passageways of caves with a meager source of light, like that John MacLaine in a ventilation shaft with a lighter. He prepares for a decisive battle with the monster and smears himself with healing slime (don’t ask), well, just like Schwarzenegger cheater’s dirt in the confrontation with the Predator.

All this could look quite effective if it didn’t look so silly. And it’s not that there’s something wrong with the heroine, because the cinematography has given plenty of strong female characters and cool warriors (currently Ellen Ripley is mentioned first of all). It’s a matter of implementing the idea.

Even the critics who unanimously praised the far from outstanding “Enola Holmes” lost patience somewhere, and the feminist pathos is no longer so salutary here (at the time of writing, the rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a modest 60% at 93 ” Enola Holmes 2 “).

The real trouble is that the adventures here are done so primitively and undemandingly that even within the framework of the conventional fantasy genre it is seen as a blatant implausible hack. In it, a barefoot girl in a tattered dress dares good fists to a fire-breathing dragoness, who in two seconds crushes helpless enemies like overripe tomatoes. At one point, the cave monster unexpectedly resorts to methods similar to the T-1000, ordering the father to call his daughter and then plunging a sharp claw into the unfortunate grandfather’s body.There is no need to mention the plot or character development. If the creators of the tape were a little more inventive or cunning, they could have followed the unobvious path of Jordan Peele and his debut “Get Out” and released something more extraordinary, mysterious and exciting. There, if we recall, Daniel Kalui’s character also went to visit his half-wife’s crazy family and almost became another victim of a bizarre ritual.

It was also possible to understand something like “Loot”, which offered a principled and truly uncompromising confrontation with an adult rating. As a last resort, try to adapt your own version of How to Train Your Dragon, the dramaturgy of which is much better than the local one.

But damn it: neither the director of the zombie horror “28 Weeks Later” Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, nor the co-screenwriter of the tenth “Fast & Furious” Dan Mazo, nor Netflix itself is clearly not aimed at a serious audience. They offer another terribly straightforward blockbuster type without the slightest fiction, which will be useful as a Friday entertainment for 12-year-old girls. In a word, we disagree, there is no place for old people here.

Millie Bobby Brown holds her own in the frame perfectly and even performs a rope climb, but risks being stuck in a single role in soulless glossy films of dubious quality. Robin Wright does not have enough time to be a prudent bitch so that the viewer gets at least some joy from the punishment of evil. And in general, it seems that this is the week of Ray Winstone on Netflix, with which a new project is released for the second day in a row after Guy Ritchie’s “Gentlemen”.

It is good that modern progressive filmmakers are trying to deconstruct established paths and ossified fairy-tale images. But it should be done in better ways than creating primitive and practically plotless one-day events.

There is no doubt (although there is specifically here) that today the virgin is able to cope with any calamity in this unfair world. But all her efforts will be in vain if the tape itself is a complete disaster.

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Conclusion:

In the battle against an insurmountable metaphorical enemy, the main character is Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis, and someone else all in one person. It’s just that the creators forget to give her at least some individual features, and it looks much more telling than the girl’s ability to achieve a goal with fire and a sword.