New ‘Aladdin’ improves on original
Aladdin Rated: PG for some action/peril. Running time: 128 minutes. 666 out of 4
“Aladdin,” the live-action remake of the 1992 Disney animation, is more than a pleasant surprise. It’s a complete delight that stands up its own and is, in many ways, an improvement on the original.
Earlier this year, Disney did something similar with “Dumbo,” and it’s a trend that should be encouraged. There are things that live action can do that do that animation simply can’t. Of course, the opposite is also true, that animation can do things hat live-action can’t — but there are fewer of those things today than there were in 1941 or even 1992.
The new “Aladdin” is at least as much a visual feast as the earlier version. It seems to soar. It’s as if the movie itself were a magic carpet that seamlessly that carries the viewer from one rich site to the next, with nothing jarring, just everything beautiful and unfolding. It’s directed by Guy Ritchie, who usually overdoes it, but not here. “Aladdin” is colorful and splashy, but not vulgar. It’s at least 30 minutes longer than the animated version, and yet it flies by.
That’s the big picture. Then there are the little pictures, the details. For example, Aladdin has a monkey here that is either CGI or the greatest monkey talent the screen has ever known.
From a visual perspective, the only thing that’s weird here is the genie’s legs. He doesn’t have any. If you saw the animation, you might not have even noticed, but in live-action it’s glaring: Here, every time Will Smith appears as the genie – a huge, towering, blue figure – there’s just smoke where his legs ought to be, and, well, we feel a little sorry for him.
But that’s a small price to pay for all that we gain. Instead of the blocky animated figures of Aladdin and Princess Jasmine, we get the real, live, breathing figures of Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott in those roles. Suddenly, the romance looks like a romance, not like something in place of a romance, not like a Disney animated idea of a romance, but like two goodlooking young people who are attracted to each other.
The movie opens with Will Smith on a modest yacht, telling his two children a story. He has a beard, and we don’t know if this is the genie in his human incarnation, or if the storyteller just looks like the genie. Before we can figure that out, Smith starts singing, and that’s when everyone gets nervous. Not the kids — they’ve heard it before — but the entire audience, which starts worrying if the whole thing is going to be like this. Don’t worry. It isn’t.
Next, we meet young Aladdin, who is a frisky young thief with a heart of gold. He just steals so he can have enough money to feed himself. Apparently, he can’t get a job and there’s no economic safety net in this kingdom, which is a bit odd, when you consider that half the movie is about how great the current Sultan and his daughter are.
Aladdin meets Jasmine in his travels, just as she’s stealing bread and giving it to starving children. (There’s your economic policy, right there.) The baker gets angry, and she and Aladdin start running. The ensuing chase scene is not quite Jackie Chan-level, but it’s exciting and imaginative, and the movie never slows down from there. It takes time to breathe, but it never drags.
Will Smith, legs or not, makes for a sly, sensitive genie. Some will compare him to Robin Williams’ earlier genie, but there’s really no comparing them, because they were playing different roles. Williams was playing himself, riffing at full speed. Smith is playing a genie, who has had 10 thousand years of watching human beings make the same mistakes over and over and is getting weary of it.
As Aladdin, Mena Massoud is charming and vulnerable, an easy person to care about. As for Naomi Scott, she’s a movie star. Jasmine is just the beginning. She thrives here, playing the princess as a feminist heroine who really should inherit her father’s kingdom. To that end, the movie provides her with a new power anthem, “Speechless,”" which is fairly awful, but Scott gives it everything. She sings up and down the block. She sings it as if hoping, through sheer volume, she could blast out of the story’s confines and into the 21st century, where she belongs.
Today, “Aladdin” is a Disney movie, or a Guy Ritchie. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, in five years, “Aladdin” will be thought of as a Naomi Scott movie, as the film where she broke through.