Do yourself a favor and just watch the animated version again

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2017)

It's incredible how lifeless this live-action adaptation (with real, breathing humans) is compared to the 1991 animated version. The efforts to make the love story more believable were appreciated, but still fell way short and the effort was barely there in terms of writing and acting. The visuals were unimpressive at the least to downright ugly in some. (A simple example would be the rose, just sadly trapped in glass, not even glowing. Lifeless.) The musical pieces were bland, nothing really special, like the commitment was just halfway, just something they had to do. (Be Our Guest was especially disappointing: badly designed, choreographed and directed that really, you would beg to just watch the animated version again instead.) I would've cut some of those additional songs as well. The singing, except for 6-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, was mediocre. Autotune was definitely used for a lot of them, but you can especially tell with lead Emma Watson. The acting was also all over the place. Out of the actors we see on screen, only Luke Evans really commits to his role, his best moments being in the first half of the movie. Dan Stevens' performance is hard to decipher, since his voice was heavily edited for Beast, and his face is completely CGI. Also eye roll-worthy were the fake French accents some voice actors had to use while others retain their own English accents, and Mrs. Potts voiced by Emma Thompson had a cockney accent. Remember that everyone is in France anyway. Either hire French actors or just drop the 'accent' entirely. This movie was nothing but a complete cash grab for Disney, and the box office numbers will unfortunately let them keep making movies this empty.