Annie (2014)

The 2014 Annie arrives with its Depression-era setting traded for a Harlem foster home and its redheaded orphan recast as a Black girl with a Shiba Inu and a talent for deflection. This is a casting decision made with visible intent, and it works on its own terms: Quvenzhané Wallis is the most watchable thing in the frame, and the film surrounds her with a genuinely multiracial ensemble. Whether that constitutes a statement is another matter. The film places its diversity in front of the camera and then declines to say anything about it, which is a choice, and a telling one.

The politics are similarly decorative. Will Stacks, a cellphone mogul running for mayor, is briefly skewered as a publicity opportunist, and Miss Hannigan gets a line about rich people being selfish, but the movie cannot sustain the thought for a full musical number. It ends by celebrating a benevolent billionaire, a literacy center named after him, and the warm embrace of material comfort. The critique dissolves the moment the helicopter appears. There is a girl at the center who is self-assured and surrounded by women, and a drunk female antagonist who gets a redemption arc, but the film never argues anything about gender. It simply casts women and moves on.

What the film does offer is earnest sentiment about reading, foster care, and family, delivered in the soft register of a family musical instead of a sermon. Annie cannot read at ten years old, a fact the plot treats as a literacy gap and nothing more. No romantic subplot steps outside convention, no environmental concern intrudes, no body or brain is examined for its difference. This is a remake that updates the surface and leaves the machinery untouched. It wants to be liked. It is, at moments. It is not trying to teach us anything we did not already agree to.