ALADDIN
Director Guy Ritchie
Cert PG 128 mins
After seeing Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin I asked myself a simple question: Why does this film exist?
Why is Disney turning their cartoon classics into live-action updates – from Aladdin to 2016’s The Jungle Book, from 2017’s Beauty and the Beast to the forthcoming Lion King? Is it to satisfy our gnawing nostalgia? Or, perhaps more cynically, is it to squeeze more money out of their trustworthy intellectual property? After all, those who loved these movies as kids now have kids of their own – and so we’ll take them, just like I took my daughter, to introduce them to these well-loved stories from our not-so-distant past.
But if I’m honest, I wish this story had stayed there.
Now, let me be clear. The movie isn’t actually bad. Aladdin (Mena Massoud) is brighteyed; Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is beautiful. Minus Jafar, who seemed to exchange the cartoon’s craven menace for a muddled, sociopolitical war strategy, is well cast. Top marks in particular for finding largely Middle Eastern actors for a film born out of Arabian Nights.
Will Smith’s genie is split in two. Half is a homage to Robin Williams - and a tepid one at that. Smith just doesn’t have Williams’s bravura – who does? – nor is he assisted by the original’s dimension-bending animation. Anytime my recollection compared Smith’s character to Williams, the comparison didn’t end well for the former.
And yet the genie’s other half works quite well. In a new subplot – the 2019 version is 39 minutes longer than the original – the genie doubles as Aladdin’s wingman in his pursuit of Jasmine. Somewhat improbably, the genie is also given a love interest of his own: Dalia, the princess’s handmaiden. Played by comedian Nasim Pedrad, Dalia is without question this version’s best invention, due to her comedic timing and the way she gives Smith something to do other than a poor Robin Williams impersonation.
That, I suppose, is the operative word for the entire film: impersonation. After all, that’s basically what the whole thing is. Sometimes it works – it’s hard to mess up the pure pathos behind ‘A Whole New World’. Sometimes it doesn’t – Smith v. Williams is a rout. But after two-plus hours I hardly felt like I’d seen a movie, but a middling impersonation with occasional improvisation.
What else is there to say? For Christians, it might be a worthwhile exercise to watch both films with your kids and discuss the various differences, and what they might reveal about how the world changes in 27 years. For those with daughters, it might be useful to discuss the new iteration of Jasmine – far from being a damsel in distress, she wants to be sultan, not defined merely by her relationship to a man. For those who want to talk about how more stuff, whether money or titles or wishes, doesn’t accompany more joy, it might be useful to talk about the shortcomings of Aladdin’s transition to Prince Ali.
Or it might be best to just stay at home and watch the original, saving yourself both some money and 39 minutes.
