3/5
Into the Woods is a musical fairy tale that revolves around a baker (Corden) and his wife (Blunt) who cannot seem to get pregnant. They discover that a curse of infertility has been placed on them by the witch living next door (Streep). The only way to reverse it is to bring her ingredients from other fairy tales: Rapunzel's hair, Little Red Riding Hood's little red riding hood, Jack and the Beanstalk's white cow, and Cinderella's slipper.
The film version of Into the Woods suffers from the fact that it was made by Disney. The play's raison d'être is to satirize the overly-romanticized fairy tales on which Disney prides itself, to make them darker and dig deeper into their sentimental "happily ever afters." Disney's version is no longer edgy; all the adulteries and deaths are cleaned up and hidden so that the film will be appropriate for little kids. There is one glaring exception to this general sentiment and that is the Big Bad Wolf. Johnny Depp somehow manages to turn the character of a hungry wolf into a stalker pedophile, which would be uncomfortable to watch in any film but is downright disturbing in a Disney film.
As if that wasn't enough to ruin the movie, they cut out my favorite part. In the original production, the narrator eventually becomes part of the action and gets killed in the ensuing chaos. There is no narrator in Disney's movie. (Well, there is, but he's not a character involved in the story.) The worst!
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951265/