Critic Reviews

The cuteness of Godmothered is a winning one overall, especially in how it uses a playful sense of humor and good heart to find its own way to Happily Ever After.

The result is a movie that interrogates Disney tropes but actually delivers on dismantling them.

What elevates Godmothered is an ending that manages to tie up the film’s familiar themes in a surprisingly moving way.

For the most part, Godmothered is a mixed-bag of clever comedy and banal kid-movie clichés, but director Sharon Maguire (“Bridget Jones’ Baby”) and writers Kari Granlund (2019’s “Lady and the Tramp”) and Melissa Stack (“The Other Woman”) craft an ending that’s so emotionally and intellectually satisfying that it’s easy to forgive the film’s less magical attributes.

At least Bell and Fisher make the most of their screen time, with each playing off each other like close friends simply thrilled for the opportunity to frolic in the film’s ridiculous fantasyland.

Godmothered is a campy and heartfelt family-friendly Christmas flick, but ends up feeling like an adult rom-com shoehorned into a kids movie.

A script that scrimps on laughs — not enough zingers or pratfalls — and relies on sentiment to get by lets them down.

Godmothered has all the pieces for at least an amiable enough production. Instead, the result is a paradoxical combination of sweet messages and dull execution, good-hearted ideas and bizarre subplots, a dull affair that very clearly sprang from a good place.

Most of what Disney+ has released among its live-action fare is the kind of mid-budget movie that served as the Disney studio’s bread and butter in the 1990s. Godmothered, even with its connection to the Disney fairy-tale universe, is very much in line with those watchable, wholly unremarkable films. It helps that Jillian Bell and Isla Fisher do their best in predictable roles, but the roles being so predictable is hard to look past.

The movie does serve up a rather satisfying ending, suggesting the studio’s latest politically correct reinterpretation of “true love.” The rest looks cheap and lacks much of a personality.