Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022)
★★ — Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022)
There is a specific kind of torture that only parents truly understand, and it goes something like this: your child finds a film they love, and then they watch it again. And again. And again. And again. By the time we're somewhere in the region of watch number fifty, you stop seeing the film and start seeing a blur of colour and noise that lives rent-free in your skull whether the television is on or not. That has been my experience with Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical. My daughter has put this thing on so many times I've genuinely lost count. Four hundred million is only a slight exaggeration.
And look, I want to be fair. I'm aware that my feelings about this film are almost certainly coloured by sheer, grinding overexposure. If I'd sat down with it once, maybe twice, in a normal set of circumstances, I suspect I'd have come away thinking it was perfectly fine. A decent enough kids' musical. Competently made. Nothing offensive about it. Fine.
But even allowing for all of that, even giving it every possible benefit of the doubt, I still can't get particularly excited about it. Because here's the thing that really gets me: after all those viewings, after all that repetition, not a single song has properly lodged itself in my brain. The songs are catchy enough in the moment, sure. While the film is on, they're doing their job. But the second the credits roll, they evaporate. For a musical, that feels like a fairly significant problem. The best ones leave you humming something on the way to work. This one leaves me with nothing.
What doesn't help is that I genuinely love Matilda. The 1996 version with Danny DeVito is, in my view, close to perfect. It's got heart and darkness and real wit, and it treats the story with a kind of scrappy, slightly anarchic energy that suits Dahl down to the ground. So I'm coming into this musical adaptation already protective of something I care about, which is never the ideal starting point.
This version is slicker, bigger, more obviously produced as a spectacle. And maybe that's part of the problem. It's polished where the original was rough around the edges, and those rough edges were part of what made it feel alive. Here everything is very well organised, very well choreographed, very much A Production. The kids are talented, the performances are committed, and it all looks impressive. But impressive and memorable aren't the same thing.
I'll be honest that there are moments where it works. The energy in some of the bigger ensemble numbers is hard to resist entirely, and you can see why children respond to it. My daughter's enthusiasm for it is, in its own way, a form of data. Kids clearly connect with it, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's a bad film for children. It isn't. As a piece of family entertainment it does what it sets out to do.
It's just that "does what it sets out to do" isn't high praise. And when I stack it up against the version of this story I actually love, it comes up short in almost every department that matters to me. The darkness feels softened. The humour feels safer. The whole thing feels like it's been processed through one too many rounds of notes until all the weird, prickly Dahl energy got smoothed away.
Two stars. Probably more than fair given the number of times it has played in my living room against my will, but I'm trying to be a reasonable man about it.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-06-27
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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