10 Recent Movies With One AWFUL Subplot

The recently-released Cruella faced a major dramatic hurdle from the outset - how the hell do you make Cruella de Vil (Emma Stone), the woman who will go on to murder Dalmatians for their fur, a protagonist audiences can actually identify with?

The answer, inevitably, is that Cruella isn't quite the lead-in to 101 Dalmatians that many expected, and it's really best thought of as an alternate reality origin story ala Joker, offering a standalone reimagining of the iconic character, albeit one that's already got a sequel in the works.

And so, the whole dog-murdering aspect of Cruella's character has been jettisoned entirely, even if the film devotes an entire subplot to bending over backwards and trying to explain her antipathy towards the animals.

Hilariously, an early scene shows Cruella's mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) being pushed off a cliff to her death by a pack of Dalmatians, the implication being that this sewed the seeds for her future villainy.

But of course, it eventually transpires that the Dalmatians were commanded to attack Catherine at the behest of their owner, Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). And because this isn't enough of a twist, Hellman is also Cruella's biological mother.

By this point the constant rejigging and re-framing of the truth is more annoying than entertaining, with the film being so desperate to distance itself from the popular conception of Cruella that one has to question why this wasn't just an original character instead (hint: because money).