Why Gal Gadot’s Evil Queen Performance Is A Disaster

We are in a creative age when villains are typically misunderstood. The box office success of Universal Pictures’ adaptation of “Wicked” has merely cemented the obvious: the bad guys we know aren’t really all that bad, if we get to know them. The Wicked Witch of the West, one of the most iconic villains in cinema history, has been thoroughly and agreeably overhauled into Elphaba, an intelligent and moral young woman who rebels against a con artist who calls himself the Wizard and demonizes her to his people to ensure that they’ll stay true to him.

But “Wicked” is far from the only piece of modern pop culture that tries to revisit quintessential baddies. Perhaps it’s fitting that a number of the most recent examples come from the Walt Disney Company, which first established itself as a place where classic stories of good and evil can be told and retold on the big screen. Films like “Maleficent” and “Cruella” aren’t just named after memorable villains; they also attempt to make viewers rethink characters who, respectively, curse babies to a sleeping death and try to murder dogs to make a fabulous fur coat.

In point of fact, just as the entire company was, as Walt Disney liked to say, started by a mouse, Disney’s feature film legacy began with a princess named Snow White. In the 1937 animated feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the eponymous heroine is terrorized right out of the gate by an Evil Queen so terrifying and nasty that she doesn’t even get the pleasure of having a name of her own. If her title wasn’t enough of a clue, within a few minutes of the film’s start time, the Evil Queen has not only banished Snow White to be a servant, but she’s also so overcome with jealousy that she’s no longer the fairest in the land that she instructs a Huntsman to kill Snow White.

Hence, when Disney announced that it was remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action/CGI movie titled simply “Snow White,” it was easy to wonder if the new interpretation of the Evil Queen would be softer, kinder, or merely more complex. Now that the film has arrived (you can check out /Film’s review here), it’s a case of good news and bad news. The good news? This Evil Queen, as portrayed by Gal Gadot, is just as evil as she was before. The bad news? Gadot’s performance is absolutely terrible.

To talk about why Gadot’s performance fails so utterly, it’s important to be clear about what she’s trying to do and how that attempt may be successful without actually working. As noted above, this Evil Queen is not given any extra dimension or depth in the “Snow White” script credited to Erin Cressida Wilson; that is, frankly, a good thing. Among the annals of Disney villains, the Evil Queen may not be the very worst one, all told. (Again, Cruella De Vil tried to murder 100 dogs to make a coat. That might be a little more awful, no?) But she is also decidedly one-dimensional in the best way. As depicted in both “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and director Marc Webb’s remake, the Evil Queen is as gorgeous as she is vain — someone so obsessed with her looks that she has a Magic Mirror whose sole purpose is to confirm to her on a frequent basis that she’s the most beautiful woman in her kingdom.

“Snow White” does expand on the story from the animated original in general, but still only skims the surface of what’s going on with the Evil Queen. From this new film, we learn that she arrived in the nameless kingdom after its king lost his queen to an illness, and that she charmed him into falling in love with her. Of course, once that happens, the woman’s true colors emerge; she sends the king off to his death so that she can control the land, essentially convincing its denizens to put down their farming tools in favor of the weapons of a soldier. But while we see new evidence of the Queen’s magic, there’s only so much detail given (much of it depicted visually rather than being explained through dialogue or narration). And the broad strokes of what the Evil Queen does to Snow White remain the same in the remake as they are in the original film: she sends a Huntsman to kill our heroine, gets infuriated upon realizing that the Huntsman let her go, then transforms herself into an old woman to poison Snow White with an enchanted apple.

So, on paper, the way the Evil Queen is brought to life in the live-action “Snow White” makes sense and feels true to the spirit of the animated original. It’s true that there are many differences in this new film, but those changes (some of which are more reasonable than others) are largely designed to ensure that Snow White is a character with agency instead of a helpless damsel in distress. The most notable and obvious change for the Evil Queen this time around is that she gets a song of her own, titled “All is Fair.” Sung to the Huntsman after she realizes that he didn’t kill Snow White as ordered, the Evil Queen is meant to ooze snarky, nasty flamboyance in the sequence, replete with a set of female dancers vogue-ing around her as she reminds the Huntsman that since she’s in charge, anything she says goes and is, thus, fair. (The political subtext of this film is, uh, not terribly subtle.)

It’s not just that “Snow White” coincidentally arrives in theaters almost five years to the day of when Gal Gadot and some of her celebrity friends sang “Imagine” to the world via an Instagram video (a mawkish clip that was correctly mocked by the world instantly). It’s that, even though Gadot is swinging for the fences with her performance both in and outside of her big musical number, she is awkward and ungainly. The choreography in the “All is Fair” scene is as flashy as it is stilted, just a step or two removed from someone doing a robotic set of ’80s-style dance moves while singing about how evil they are.

Now, Disney has a long history of flamboyant animated baddies, especially in the modern era (think Ursula in “The Little Mermaid” or Scar in “The Lion King”). Unfortunately, many of those villains have since been unsuccessfully re-imagined in the studio’s live-action remakes. It’s as much to do with the actors in question failing to truly embody these characters as it is to do with our expectations of who those antagonists should be and, more often, because these films’ scripts fail their actors so spectacularly. Here, though Wilson’s script isn’t exactly sparkling, the issue is primarily Gadot. Where she should feel slimy and nasty, she instead makes a failed attempt at camp, stumbling over lines of dialogue that’re meant to make clear how odious the Queen really is.

Just as the Evil Queen seems appropriately awful and villainous within the script of “Snow White,” in theory Disney casting Gal Gadot makes sense. She’s a well-known actor who’s not too far removed from bringing Wonder Woman, one of the most iconic comic book superheroes of all time, to life. (And although the 2017 “Wonder Woman” feels like it arrived five lifetimes ago, Gadot is undeniably excellent in that first film.) But it’s also not hard to consider other actors around the age of 40 — Gadot hits that milestone at the end of April — and imagine them in the distinctive gown of the Evil Queen.

What might “Snow White” have looked like, with the exact same script and music, if Rachel Zegler as Snow White had been forced to face off against, say, Scarlett Johansson as the Evil Queen? Or Aubrey Plaza? Or Keira Knightley? All of those actors, aside from being similarly luminous and having worked with the Walt Disney Company before, would have felt fittingly intimidating as the film’s villain, and may well have brought sequences like the “All is Fair” number to life with verve and energy. (It is worth noting, by the way, that the excessively wordy lyrics of “All is Fair” don’t do Gadot any favors. She falls flat in this scene, but the song itself isn’t a winner either.)

Any remake of a Disney classic faces a huge mountain of a creative challenge, especially one that arrives after a long line of other frustrating examples. Many of the other recent Disney remakes have either tried to mildly soften their bad guys — consider how Luke Evans as Gaston in the 2017 “Beauty and the Beast” is just a touch less misogynistic and obnoxious than the animated version — or simply can’t help but fumble their depiction. Think of the flat visuals and uninspired vocal performance from the otherwise-remarkable Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar in Jon Favreau’s “Lion King” remake, or Melissa McCarthy as Ursula in “The Little Mermaid,” or Marwin Kenzari as Jafar in the 2019 version of “Aladdin,” and so on and so forth.

Still, even these performances have been forgettably bad for one reason or another. Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen in “Snow White,” on the other hand, is clumsy and even wince-inducing to watch. It’s the kind of performance that will live on in people’s memories for all the wrong reasons.

“Snow White” is currently playing in theaters.