With “Maleficent,” we may be getting the closest Disney will ever come to “Ms. 45,” Abel Ferrara’s bloody cult favorite about a woman (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) hunting down and murdering the men who raped her. At the same time, it carries on in the “Frozen” tradition (no doubt coincidentally, since both films were in production at the same time) of liberating two-dimensional storybook characters from their shackles and allowing them to be as emotionally rich, heroic, and independent as their male counterparts.
The premise of turning the memorably wicked witch from “Sleeping Beauty” into a protagonist might seem like a gimmick that would quickly fizzle out, but screenwriter Linda Woolverton (“Beauty and the Beast”), with a great assist from Angelina Jolie, offers a “Wicked”-style do-over that results in a movie that’s as entertaining as it is bold.