Checked out the new film version of Annie… now starring Jamie Foxx as Not-Daddy-Warbucks (he’s cell phone billionaire running for office Will Stacks) and Quevenzhal Wallace (from Beasts of the Southern Wild) as Annie. Just to get it out of the way, this is a racially swapped version of Annie which is fine though they do mock the red-haired tap-dancing Annie at the very start in a way that’s slightly disrespectful. But whatever… this is produced by Will and Jada Smith with Jay Z doing the music and it was originally planned to have Willow Smith in the lead roll… but we dodged that bullet when you think back to how god-awful Jaden Smith was in the god-awful After Earth. Quevenzhal Wallace (who’s name is unspellable) is a talented little girl even if I did think Beasts of the Southern Wild was over-rated. Here she’s spunky and cute… but she can’t sing which seems like a problem for a musical.

Yes, this retains the songs from the previous productions and has added a few new ones… though honestly I don’t really know all the songs well enough (except for the standards like Hark Knock Life and Tomorrow). But I can say half the cast cannot sing well enough – and that includes Wallace and Cameron Diaz who appears to be in a wholly different movie with her over-the-top cartoon character she’s playing.

I’ll also add that there’s some too-obvious attempts to modernize the story with some bad dialog that peppers in too many bits of modern slang (yolo, throwing shade, etc.) in a way that feels too intentionally placed and not natural. And there’s also an issue with the songs where Cameron Diaz is allowed to question why people are singing suddenly but no one else does which is basically a musical admitting that musicals are for squares. And they felt the need to toss in a comment (which I thought was actually kind of funny) when the little girls drop into Hard Knock Life… one asks what that means and another says, “it means our life sucks”… which, hey, maybe they should have rewritten the lyrics to suit.

But, you know, if you can ignore the songs and the pedestrian reimagining of the story, there’s nothing offensive about this movie. It’s cute, it’s fluff, it’s inoffensive and the on-screen relationship between Jamie Foxx and Walace is pretty adorable (and Rose Byrne as a obvious-if-they-would-just-admit-it romantic lead with Foxx is really charming too). They work well together, even if they don’t sing well together. And I guess if the movie is anchored on their relationship and that works, it can’t be all that bad a movie. It’s getting terrible reviews and part of me suspects that’s from people who have too much love for earlier versions of the story and/or who cannot forgive (or at least tolerate) mediocre covers of classic songs (and new songs peppered in to give Jay Z something to do).

Wish I could be a hater and write a strikingly vicious critique… but, no, I can’t. It’s fine. We’re fine. We’re all fine here. How are you?

Score: 75