"Mulan" is finally coming into the live-action spotlight, as Disney's remake of the animated movie has finally found its new face in the form of Liu Yifei. However, the Chinese people do not seem to share the same sentiment towards her as Disney and most of the movie's western fan base.
According to the reports of website Quartzy, Yifei is apparently one of the worst Chinese actresses. This was based on China's own movie portal similar to IMBD, named Douban. Though the website is in Mandarin, it can be seen that Yifei's score based on the roles she has fulfilled only amounts to 5.2 out of 10. This is quite a low average score considering the two dozen movies she has acted in.
Based on the calculations of the Chinese website, a score of 7 out of 10 would be necessary for a star to be considered good by Chinese standards. It also seems that a lot of Chinese moviegoers do not like Yifei, with some even writing destructive criticism on one of the pages of her movies. The said criticism has also garnered 8,000 likes, which could mean that a lot of people agree with the commenter's idea that Yifei is bad.
Apart from that, Yifei has also been nominated for Douban's annual mock award, which lets user nominate who they think is the worst actress or actor for the year. Yifei was nominated as the worst actress in the years 2012, 2013, and 2016. One criticism towards Yifei was that the beautiful actress is afraid of being ugly, hence the apparent lack of facial expressions in most of her roles, both in movie and television.
Still, it does not seem to matter to Disney, as the actress has already been chosen for the role of Mulan. In addition, out of the 1,000 candidates who applied for the coveted Hollywood role, Yifei was considered by Disney as the perfect one. This was probably due to Yifei's impressive background of solid martial arts skills, fluent English, and her star quality. Whether this will affect the movie's critical and commercial standing in China remains to be seen once the movie gets released on 2019.
