Visual feast, dumbed down dialogue and zero heart

Rating: 3/10 (26 July 2019)

As expected, the movie opens with possibly, IMO, the greatest opening scene EVER in the history of movies. The song, the scale, it's all pretty close to the original, even if one or two notes are deliberately sung differently.
Visually, the movie looks great. I wouldn't go as far to say it looks incredible, but it does look pretty good. But that's about it. Like so many people, I have seen the original so many times, I can almost recite every line word for word. And that's where the problem starts. A lot of the wisecracks and humor has been discarded with, for no apparent reason.
So many of my favourite one-liners and jokes have been replaced with bland, instantly forgettable lines. Beyonce just overdoes all her lines, and the new song they slotted in, Spirit, was just flat and pointless, even in its two minutes of existence.
For anyone who hasn't seen the original (and I realised there were actually quite a few of those in the audience with me), it might just be an average movie. For those of us who grew up with it over the past 25 years, it is a disappointing, flat, soul-less money grab by Disney and they should be ashamed of it. But of course, they aren't. It's all about the money, and not the heart, even though that's what Disney used to claim all those years back.
The recent Jungle Book, which came out a couple of years ago, was much better than this movie in every aspect. Such a sad indication of what Disney has become.