Review: 'Cruella' gives sympathy for DeVil, with a wickedly witty origin story for Disney's puppy-snatching villainess

Turning one of Disney’s meanest villains — a would-be puppy killer, no less — into a sympathetic character is a tall order, but director Craig Gillespie is up to the task in the spirited and wickedly fun “Cruella.”

Gillespie has a track record of finding the tender side of unpleasant people. Early in his career, in “Lars and the Real Girl,” he gave us Ryan Gosling as a lonely nerd in love with a realistic sex doll. In “I, Tonya,” he and Margot Robbie conspired to make us take pity on Olympic skater and tabloid sensation Tonya Harding. And he’s signed up next to tell the twisted love story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee for Netflix. So humanizing a maniacal fashion designer should be a snap.

“Cruella” is an origin story that begins with a little girl named Estella (played at age 12 by Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), a girl bullied at her boarding school because her hair is half black and half white. She retaliates by letting her proto-punk nasty side out — an alter ego her mother (Emily Beecham) dubs “Cruella.”

When Estella’s mum suddenly uproots her daughter, and they are set to move to London, they make a fateful stop at Hellman Hall, home of the famous fashion designer known as The Baroness (Emma Thompson). Estella is traumatized when she sees The Baroness’s attack dogs — dalmatians, of course — push her mum off a cliff.

The now-orphaned Estella lands in London and is befriended by two young thieves, Jasper and Horace. The three become fast friends, and partners in crime. A decade later, in the late ’70s, Estella — now played by Emma Stone — wants to fulfill her dreams of being a designer. Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) thinks it’s an angle for a new crime spree, but Jasper (Joel Fry) believes in Estella, and finagles a job interview for her at a posh department store.

The department store gig leads Estella to a bigger job, as an assistant and junior designer to The Baroness. Estella, her two-tone hair covered by a dye job, labors intensely to satisfy her imperious boss. At the same time, she wants to take revenge on The Baroness. So she enlists a secondhand-store operator, Artie (played by John McCrea, soon to be world-famous as the star of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie”), to create an alternate fashion persona — named Cruella.

One of the joys of “Cruella” is how the screenplay — credited to Dana Fox (“How to Be Single”) and Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite”), with three other writers getting story credit — escalates the public fashion battle between the established Baroness and the punk-minded Cruella. The frock fight is made more entertaining by the outlandishly stylish work of costume designer Jenny Beavan (an Oscar winner for “A Room With a View” and “Mad Max: Fury Road”). 

Gillespie guides us through Estella’s transformation from punk pre-teen to fashionista to scourge of London with devilishly fun set pieces and a rollicking pace. He also is smart to deploy the movie’s best weapons, the two Emmas, for maximum cattiness. Both Stone and Thompson are clearly having the time of their lives chewing the scenery and taking swipes at each other — with Stone’s snide derision matching Thompson’s haughty high maintenance at every turn.

Disney purists may be put off by the rewriting of canon — what comic-book fans call “retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity,” the act of reverse-engineering the past to sync up to the present — that makes Cruella more sympathetic than her character was in the original “101 Dalmatians.” If viewers can get past that, as Disney asked them to do with “Maleficent,” this “Cruella” is a DeVil of a good time.

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‘Cruella’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 28, in theaters everywhere, and available on Disney+ Premier. Rated PG-13 for some violence and thematic elements. Running time: 134 minutes.