Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Once Upon a Crime’ on Netflix, a Hybrid Of Fairy Tales And Whodunit

The fairytale-adaptation trend of a decade ago meets the murder-mystery trend of today in Once Upon a Crime (now streaming on Netflix), a Japanese film that answers the burning question on everybody’s mind: What if we subbed out Hercule Poirot for Little Red Riding Hood? OK, maybe it’s not quite so burning, this yeah-sure-what-the-hey premise that seems like it has potential for comedy and/or cleverness. But in reality, it offers none of that, as we’ll get into right now. 

ONCE UPON A CRIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Doodily-dum, diddley-dee, Little Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto) flits through the forest, making her way to – well, who knows, because whatever it was she was doing, she’s quickly waylaid by the most annoying wicked witch (Midoriko Kimura) in movie history. I mean, this witch’s laugh is so fake and grating, it makes Woody Woodpecker’s signature cackle sound like Kenny G. The witch makes a completely senseless and unwarranted big deal out of LRRH’s shoes, and it’s extra irritating because it chews up approximately 400 minutes of screen time, and feels like 4,000. Allow me to jump ahead for you: WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER, LRRH ends up tenderly barefooting it through the woods until she comes upon a girl in a raggedy dress – and LRRH’s shoes. And so LRRH stops to talk to the girl, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s Cinderella (Yuko Araki) herself, in the flesh. All we need now is Snow White, and we’d have Charlie’s Angels by way of the Brothers Grimm, but this movie is already too damn long with just two fairytale characters.

This is when we learn that LRRH is incredibly perceptive, as she’s able to suss out the whole bullied-by-evil-stepmother-and-stepsisters just by observing Cindy’s mannerisms and clothing. (LRRH’s powers of deduction might be magic, considering they’re accompanied by some special effects and flashy edits, but that’s never made clear.) Then that goddamned witch turns up again to be audience to Cindy’s sob story about the big ball and how she wants to go and the scene drags into infinity and then WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER a good fairy-witch also turns up and between the two annoying witches, our two principals end up all gussied up in glass slippers and ball gowns, taking a pumpkin-carriage driven by a mouse-man to the big shindig. 

Along the way, they run over and kill a man. Whoopsie, right? They kinda just cover it up and keep on going, because Cindy has high hopes of becoming the bride of Prince Boy Band Hair (Takanori Iwata), and that clearly should take precedence. When they get to the ball, we end up stuck in this single set piece for a million eternities as the prince mulls over his potential wife options, and the king bloviates on and on, and the evil stepmother and one of the evil stepsisters mug and dither – and the authorities arrive to announce that a man was found dead along the side of the road, and someone in this room did it. Thus begins a whodunit that no sentient being will feel even remotely invested in. Of course, you know the twist is that LRRH was involved in it, but she acts like Poirot and starts nudging the grand chamberlain out of his position as lead investigator anyway. Not that this movie knows what to do with this situation, anyway, because it quickly fumbles away an opportunity to do something interesting – not that you’re even going to be awake when you get to this point, anyway.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Once Upon a Crime would be like Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood crossed with Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, except it’s not even mediocre like those movies. It’s just so numbingly dull. 

Performance Worth Watching: [THIS SPACE LEFT BLANK FOR ADMINISTRATIVE USE] 

Memorable Dialogue: Annoying witch no. 1 shouts at LRRH, “Be impressed!” as if the movie doth protest too much its deep unimpressiveness. 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: In an effort not to be a negative Nancy, I’ll list the movie’s positive attributes first: One, it exists, which means people got paid to make it, and employment is always better than unemployment. Two, the design on its approximately three-and-a-half set pieces ain’t half bad. Three, the costumes are nice, which is terrific since the characters wearing them are so void of personality, we might as well be watching fancy dresses and hats float by us on a conveyor belt. 

Otherwise, well, Once Upon a Crime is an endurance test. Your patience will be tortured on the rack, never to be rewarded with a single satisfying dramatic development or interesting shot. It’s so slowly paced, it makes tedium look like Speedy Gonzalez. Our protagonist is supposed to be a tireless truth-seeker, but is more like a mannequin in a cheapo hoodie in a TJ Maxx display. Everyone stands around and talks; rarely do any of these characters actually DO anything. There’s something about this kingdom being full of superficial cretins who shun anyone who isn’t conventionally beautiful, but that potential shred of wafer-thin simplistic social commentary crumples to the ground to be eaten by starving earthworms.

The mystery component involves sussing out clues about a missing crown, and some big locks of hair, and a missing stepsister, and a woman whose face is hidden in a raggedy cloak, and how the dead guy maybe wasn’t always such a nice person. Eventually, we get to the classic glass-slipper shit. But that’s preceded and followed by characters reciting bone-dry dialogue as they just stand there, their Fitbits dying of old age right there on screen. Seriously. These people barely move a muscle as they explain and explain and explain and explain things in the most excruciatingly dull manner possible. A fly could fart in this movie and it’d be a relative narrative tremor measuring at 7.9 on the Richter scale. Reader, I was bored out of my MIND. This is a bad, bad movie. Bad. Bad! BAD. Don’t watch it!

Our Call: Once Upon a Crime? More like Once Upon It Feels Like I’m Waayyyyy Past My Bedtime! SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.