Review: Is Snow White as awful as everyone says?

When the Walt Disney studios announced they were finally doing a live-action version of their 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it felt both inevitable and a bit depressing.

If ever a film was already burnt into the memory of anyone likely to want to see it - or to take someone else to see it - it’s the now trimmed down Snow White.

I say, “trimmed down”. I just mean the title. This version is 30 minutes longer than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though it feels even more so.

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In the original, establishing Princess Snow White being bullied by her jealous stepmother the Queen, and yet still being beloved by her people, takes about 20 seconds. It’s the setup. Let’s get on.

Here we need 20 minutes of tedious exposition about her father and her mother, and their tragic fates.

But finally Snow gets to sing her obligatory “I want” song.

In the original, you may remember, she had high hopes that someday her Prince would come. This time? Well, it’s a little less clear.

She’s waiting for something, even if it’s a bit non-specific. The producers may feel they’ve dodged a bullet here – post Barbie, modern young girls should wish for something more than a handsome prince, surely.

But sooner or later, this lack of clear motivation is going to bite them.

Meanwhile, let’s check out the wicked Queen, played by the statuesque but strangely bland Gal Gadot.

Gadot, you may remember, was Wonder Woman, a part that required very little more than athleticism and a short skirt. But suddenly this time she has to act. Hmm.

No threat to Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman, is all I can say. But certainly, a threat to Snow White, particularly if the subject of the poor and downtrodden comes up.

Mind you, the Princess who’s also a champion of democracy has always been a uniquely Hollywood creation.

Anyway, off she goes to be killed by the soft-hearted huntsman, who lets her run away into the forest.

Incidentally, these scenes stick pretty close to the original, though compared with the inspired animation of 1937, they feel like the result of a collision between some expensive computers and lumps of plasticine.

And all the time we’re dreading the arrival of the new improved Seven Dwarfs. At one stage, it seems they were going to go the way of the handsome prince.

There’d be a lovable band of robbers, led by a good-looking member of the proletariat. No princes, remember?

Head Office subsequently seems to have changed its mind. The motley band of robbers stay, but in much reduced circumstances, while a hastily-cobbled together septet of dwarfs were thrown at Snow White to keep an increasingly fractious public happy.

The end result of course was that nobody was remotely happy.

Since everyone has been so unfair to this misguided film – the bad notices came in about six months before anyone actually saw Snow White – I was tempted to praise it to the skies. But even I’m not that perverse.

Is it awful? Of course it is.

But is it worse than all the rest of the over-priced, under-inspired other Disney cover-versions of the last few years? Well, that’s hard to say.

But perhaps this one does deserve a special place in the Hall of Shame for its lumbering intro, its countless – and endless – songs, and an ending with nothing to do with the original story. Or frankly any story.

My advice – and this is true for all the Disney classics – is simply to find the originals and see how it’s done. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is still funny, scary, sweet and occasionally brilliant. Snow White is none of those things. It’s just there.