Really? A cheery musical fits the election year?

It’s probably by accident, but the new Disney+ movie fits this election year.
“The Descendants: The Rise of Red” (shown here), arriving Friday, July 12, has two opposite forces. The Blue one wants kindness, warmth and inclusiveness; the Red wants power and revenge.
The Red leader underlines that with a song that savors the fact that “red” rhymes with “you’re dead” and “off with your head.”
The Blue is currently in charge, but then the Red thugs start to break in. “What?” their leader asks. “You’ve never heard of a coup?”
And then … well, this turns into a fairy tale. It turns out that the Red leader has a decent daughter who values goodness more than family. If only.
From here, this becomes kind of what you expected – a pleasant-enough musical. The audience at Wednesday’s premiere (pre-selected, pre-disposed to approve) cheered often and then danced at the after-party.
This is the fourth in a series of movies that started in 2015 with the notion of putting the children of Disney villains into one story. It adds two great bits of casting – singer Rita Olra as the cruel Queen of Hearts and Kylie Cantrell (from two Disney Channel series) as her daughter Red, who has a disrupter’s soul, but a decent heart.
An early scene shows Red in high-octane, high-volume splendor, eluding the palace guards. That’s followed quickly by her mom’s song; if the movie stays like this, it will be a triumph.
It doesn’t.
We get a workmanlike time-travel tale.. We see some familiar faces – China Anne McClain repeating her role as Uma, the now-reformed pirate queen, Brandy and Paolo Montalban repeating their roles as Cinderella and Prince Charming from a 1997 musical.
And we see newer people. Malin Baker (as Cinderella’s daughter) and Morgan Dudley (as young Cinderella) are fine. Ruby Rose Turner (as the future Queen of Hearts) continues a long line of lovable, bubble-face Disney heroines, from Selena Gomez to Hayley Mills to Minnie Mouse.,
They work through some OK plot twists and some pleasant-enough songs. What the movie needs is big finish, matching the splendor of the beginning. Instead, it just sort of ends.