- Title: Descendants: Wicked Wonderland
- IMDb: link
A direct sequel to Descendants: The Rise of Red, Descendants: Wicked Wonderland focuses on Red (Kylie Cantrall) and Chloe (Malia Baker) discovering how much has changed based on events from the previous film. Although the Queen of Hearts (Rita Ora) has become a far more benevolent ruler, making Red a Hero Kid rather than a Villain Kid, the change has turned Maddox Hatter (Leonardo Nam) into a villain obsessed with recovering his device and altering the timeline to make himself ruler of Wonderland.
Throwing together a larger group mixed up of both hero and villain kids, which includes Red’s new sister Princess Pink (Liamani Segura), the Hatter’s son Max (Brendon Tremblay), Luis Madrigal (Alexandro Byrd) as a potential love interest for Red attempting to cut off the fan shipping of Red and Chloe as a couple, Hazel Hook (Kiara T. Romero), Robbie Hood (Joel Oulette), Felix Facilier (Zavien Garrett), and the Smees (Ryan McEwen and Dayton Paradis), Red and Chloe head to Wonderland where both their mothers will end up captives of the Hatter who seeks his time travel device. The story also gives us Awkwafina as Cheesy Cheshire continually stirring up trouble for its own amusement.
Red taking the lead by acting as a villain kid (which is, of course, all she’s ever known) and often ignoring Chloe’s advice rubs her new friend (who is also awfully self-absorbed with negligible changes to her own mother given how utterly Red’s world has changed) the wrong way. Chloe’s momentary turn into a villain kid breathes some much needed life into the bland character who spends the rest of the TV-movie as a pouting princess, gives her a far less ridiculous wig and her own song, but it also doesn’t make much sense given the larger events at play.
As a sequel dealing with the consequences from the last film, Wicked Wonderland is more successful than Rise of Red (although it’s still quite flawed). The introduction of the new kids, even if none of them are all that memorable, also gets the latest film closer to makeup of the original Descendants films dealing with groups of kids interacting rather than focusing on a single friendship. The effects in Wonderland are some of the franchise’s best (although you still see the limitations of a Disney Channel budget here and there at times).
More middling than good or bad, if this film was a villain kid it’s probably one the Smees, Descendants: Wicked Wonderland is able to make something out of the train wreck of Rise of Red. However, at the same time it requires viewers to watch the worst film of the franchise to make sense of what happens here which is pretty diabolical even for Disney.
