The highest compliment I can pay this year’s live action remake of Aladdin, now available on DVD/Blu-ray/Digital, is to say that this would be an entirely charming and fun fantasy-adventure film even if the 1992 animated original didn’t exist. Aladdin ’19 is a breezy, colorful good time with well-cast leads, great songs, a few solid blockbuster set-pieces, and one of the last great movie stars operating deep within his comfort zone and doing what he does best. For the first time since Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella riff, a Disney remake has come along that feels like an actual movie, not an IP installation piece.
A likely reason lies in the choice of Guy Ritchie as director, a head-scratching decision that pays off well. Like Branagh, Ritchie has a distinctive voice as a filmmaker that can be either intoxicating (Snatch, The Man From UNCLE) or agonizing (the Sherlock Holmes sequel, pretty much everything he made during his Madonna period) and that clear authorial stamp allows this new Aladdin to feel like its own thing. Ritchie brings along those speed-ramps that he loves, he does the thing where he doubles back to replay a scene from a different perspective, and there’s the ever-present sense of giddy momentum that you either enjoy or get exhausted by after five minutes. I tend to enjoy Ritchie’s delirious yarns (I even liked his King Arthur movie) and found him to be well-suited to what’s always been one of the more madcap Disney films without the word ‘groove’ in its title.
It helps that, like Branagh, Ritchie was already on board with outrageous pageantry even before he started adapting cartoons. Some of these other Disney remakes either try to downplay the colorful bombast of the animated originals, or bury the classic designs under ‘realistic’ reimagining (hey, remember when they did a new Beauty and the Beast and you couldn’t see where anybody’s face was? LOL, cool, thanks for the billion dollars). But Ritchie seems delighted rather than repelled by the outsized nature of the source material. The mythical city of Agrabah is his giant playground where thieves parkour up and down buildings, huge armies of dancers conduct grand musical numbers, and no one ever seems especially surprised when flying carpets and wish-granting genies show up.
The story unfolds mostly as you remember, with orphaned, pure-hearted ‘street-rat’ Aladdin (Mena Massoud) stumbling across Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) when she is out in the streets of Agrabah in disguise as a commoner. There’s an instant spark between the duo that seems doomed to falter because Jasmine must marry a prince and Aladdin is about as far from prince-dom as is humanly possible. That all changes when the evil vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) recruits/kidnaps Aladdin to retrieve a magical lamp from the Cave of Wonders. Tomfoolery involving Aladdin’s kleptomaniac monkey Abu, talkative parrot Iago, and the aforementioned magical carpet results in Aladdin making off with the lamp and the all-powerful Genie (Will Smith) within. Aladdin decides to use his three wishes to become the prince Jasmine deserves, but oh my gosh you guys what if the real prince was inside of him all along.
Yeah, Aladdin was always the thematically thinnest of the Disney Renaissance movies, with nothing really under the hood besides your standard “Just be yourself!” message. But you went along with it anyway because the animation was gorgeous, the songs (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice) were just showstopper after showstopper, and the film adopted a joke-a-second pacing and energy to suit Robin Williams’ performance as the Genie, which remains maybe the single greatest fusion of performer and animated alter ego ever.
As much as it can, the new Aladdin ports over as much as what worked as it humanly can. Early trailers made the film look small, dull, and cheap, but Ritchie crams his frame with color. Apparently flowers are very easy to come by in this desert. Aladdin ’19 is very proudly a capital-M Musical, characters shamelessly belting out their feelings and breaking reality whenever need be. Ritchie at times seems uncomfortable with how to stage and cut these numbers, with “One Jump Ahead” in particular being a mess of rapid edits that cut off and chop up both the stunts and the singing, weakening both. Instead, Ritchie is most at ease with the larger scale, CGI-riddled songs. The Genie’s two big songs (“Friend Like Me”, “Prince Ali”) are once again the big showstoppers, and Ritchie flings gags and images at the screen exactly as fast as the music demands. And “Whole New World” is once again a literally-soaring ballad that almost singlehandedly gives the non-“Genie being freed” parts of the movie whatever emotional juice they have.
Oh, and this time out Jasmine gets her own song. It’s not great and she sings it twice.
That’s a problem with the song itself, though, and nothing to do with Scott. She’s a Disney kid (she was in Lemonade Mouth, which I understand is an important movie for The Youths) who previously turned up as the Pink Ranger in that underrated Power Rangers movie from a couple years back. Scott has genuine movie star presence, with enough screen presence to more than justify the expanded focus on Jasmine(this time out, Jasmine is determined to become sultan herself, not just marry some schmuck and hand the kingdom over to him).
(Sidenote: Both Jasmine and Aladdin remain fully-clothed throughout this live action version. Sorry, millenials for whom puberty was kickstarted by her midriff and/or his permanently bare chest.)
Massoud as Aladdin was the film’s big question mark, and hopefully this proves to be a star-making role for him as well. He can sing, he can dance, he can toggle between being a swoon-worthy pretty-boy and a convincingly hapless goof, (shit, make this guy the next Superman and watch people’s skulls melt) and he manages to spend huge chunks of the movie standing next to Will Smith and not get blown off the screen. Joel Kinnaman sure couldn’t pull that shit off. Massoud and Scott strike genuine sparks off one another, to the point that I find myself kind of hoping that the rumors of a potential sequel turn out to be true. I’d like to see these versions of these characters again, or at the very least see Massoud get consistent work as a romantic lead.
There was a lot of hype around Marwan Kenzari as Jafar (or “Hot Jafar” as the Internet dubbed him once the shirtless pics hit) and he’s perfectly fine, but Jafar remains more a memorable design than a great villain. The screenplay (credited to Ritchie and John August) tries to give him some juice by making his relationship with Jasmine an antagonistic political rivalry, and with a new backstory that reveals that Jafar was himself once a street-rat who connived and hustled his way to being second-in-command to the Sultan. He’s Littlefinger, basically, but with a magic staff and without the prostitutes. This is all fine, it’s nothing egregious like that “Gaston is a traumatized/bloodthirsty war veteran” thing, but Jafar remains a fairly by-the-numbers Disney villain without much personality to distinguish his character from the pack (dude coulda really used a villain song).
Alright, let’s talk about the giant blue elephant in the room.
Will Smith as the Genie was both an ingenious and potentially very dangerous casting choice. How do you replace maybe the most beloved creation of one of the most beloved entertainers of the last 50 years, a character whose one-to-one association with his portrayer has only deepened in the minds of audiences since Williams’ tragic passing? And Smith, as beloved as he himself remains, has been on something of a cold streak. He’s still as charismatic a screen presence as any man alive, but since coming back from his post-After Earth wilderness sabbatical or whatever the hell he did, he’s been ably doing his movie star thing trapped in the wretched likes of Suicide Squad and Bright.
Everyone seems to have gone into this movie knowing that they can’t compete with Williams and wisely not even trying to beat him at his own game. Instead, Smith’s version of the Genie has been tailored to his own persona: a fast-talking, wildly overconfident hustler and hype-man. He’s Hitch, basically, if Hitch had god-like powers and a Smurf-y complexion. Smith is right in his sweet-spot as a performer and does precisely what he was hired to do. He makes the Genie’s big songs his own, hits his every joke with that laser-sharp comic timing he’s had since the Fresh Prince days, and when it comes time for the braggadocio to fall away, Smith is as vulnerable as he’s ever been on screen.
The Genie’s blue form (which is indeed his primary appearance throughout the film, although Smith also gets in plenty of face-time as himself) is a well-executed effect, accomplishing the magic trick where at a certain point you forget all the technical wizardry used to realize the character and just accept him as a character and performance. There are a few moments where things stray into the Uncanny Valley but by and large, Aladdin ’19 somehow threads the needle of honoring what made Williams’ work so iconic and special while also making the character their own.
Look, I’m as exhausted by this Disney trend as everyone else, or, at least as exhausted as we all act until the next one comes out and we all push it to a billion dollars at the box office anyway (except Dumbo, apparently. Poor little mutant). And there are absolutely moments where Aladdin ’19 falls into the trap of building its screenplay around addressing the “plot-holes” that joyless fuck-holes like those Cinemasins twerps poke into everything. The unpredictable alchemy of artistry, chance, and the contemporary cultural moment are what made the Disney Renaissance movies so special and trying to manufacture, and current Disney’s attempt to reverse-engineer that magic has been as creatively bankrupt as it has financially successful (except for Dumbo. Poor little freak).
(Sidenote: Aladdin ’19 also reaaaaaaaaaaally doesn’t want you to think too hard about the optics of Will Smith playing, essentially, a magical slave. But, yeah, it’s there every time he refers to Aladdin as “master” [which happens maybe twice, because they’ve even altered some of the song lyrics to take those kind of references out].)
But fortunately that sort of material is kept to a minimum. Instead, Aladdin ’19 is completely at ease with itself as a big, bright musical cheerfully throwing music and gags and action and color at the screen in the hopes that something catches on for you, even if it’s only through sheer tonnage.
Speaking only for myself, I found a lot to enjoy.