Hyped for the wrong reasons

Rating: 3/10 (5 December 2015)

Strong female leads are nowadays more desirable than they ever have been. Frozen capitalizes on this as strongly as possible, but fails at almost every turn. Their attempt at showing a more platonic love story is misguided and blunt with it's delivery. The story is full of plot holes and strange plot devices that make little to no sense within the context. The relationships feel forced and the message of the movie feels completely benign. Albeit, I am writing this from a 22 year old male's perspective, but having grown up with Disney movies and after the sheer gold that was Tangled, I have certain standards.
Instead of going on a long winded explanation as to my complaints with this movie, I'm going to summarize in a numbered list instead. Here are the 6 biggest problems with Frozen.
6. Elsa is boring. Aside from the brief moment with her as a child, we only see one emotion from Elsa for the entire film, worry. Her character is completely one dimensional and frankly, really disappointing. After seeing her smiling face on everything from cups to buses to billboards, I expected her to be some sort of revolutionary new character, the Ice Queen! But no. Not really no.
5: It tries and fails to replicate the chemistry between Flynn and Rapunzel with Kristoff and Anna. My favorite exchange between the two was whilst they were under attack by the wolves and hearing the sheer disbelief in Kristoff's voice, but it all goes downhill from there.
4. The songs are lazy. Let it Go feels as if the sequence was made before the rest of the movie was even written and then had to be fit in somehow. The song itself is very nice, but nowhere near what the hype train had me believe. The lyrics to Fixer Upper are horrible, but I'll be getting to that later. The rest are just forgettable really.
3. Olaf. Granted he did add an edge of humor back to this dull story, I couldn't shake the comparison to another horrible side character made for comedic purposes; Jar Jar Binks. Both suffer from having the entirety of the movie's humor lumped on them like some unwanted burden and both have a bad habit of completely derailing the immersion of the story and snapping the viewer back into a state of disbelief at their very existence. (Also, it was never explained how he came to life. That in itself was annoying.)
2. The Trolls. My reaction to these annoying, strange, out of place little creatures could be summed up in one common acronym, wtf. Unexplained, unnecessary, undesirable and just plain unintelligent in both sound and design. They are apparently love experts? The 'Fixer Upper' song was horrifyingly bad and essentially tried to bypass the chemistry of Kristoff and Anna's relationship with one big push. They simply didn't fit the world, there was no explanation as to why Kristoff was friends with them OR how the elder somehow knew how to help Anna, they were just tiny, terrible plot devices.
1. The message/revelation. Surprise! Platonic love is a kind of love! Did the movie REALLY need to be so heavy handed about this? Elsa was protecting Anna the entire movie because she loved her, so this apparent epiphany shouldn't have even been a thing. Sure, little girls everywhere apparently learned a lesson, but it was such an underwhelming resolution to the film that I was left walking away with that feeling.
Overall, I can see the power this might have for young girls, but that is all the power it has. Kristoff's character was underdeveloped and Hans' (despite his decent motive) was a strange plot twist, but far from the worst thing in the movie. I would recommend this only for the most die hard of Disney fans or those particularly fond of sister-centric plots. For a real example of a good modern Disney film, see Tangled.