Director: Guy Ritchie
Cast: Will Smith, Mena Massourd, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari
Have I Seen it Before: I mean, the typical joke about the lack of originality in Hollywood would be sort of low-hanging fruit in this particular case.
Did I Like It: I mean, sure?
From a pure study of screenwriting, it is interesting to see how the screenplay for the original Aladdin (1992) was disassembled and then put back together into… this. Large portions of the beginning of the original film are truncated to start the main meat of the story much faster, and presumably to allow space for the injected subplot. It actually works for the most part, and allows the film to reach (and perhaps intermittently succeed) to be a product of its time far more than the original did.
But then, if the goal of a Disney movie is to be truly timeless, why try to make a film a reflection of its time? Empowering Jasmine (Scott) is welcome and overdue but dwelling on the politically precarious times in Agrabah feels less magical, to put it mildly. I’ve got no problem with those moments, really, but in twenty years is it going to age very well? Let’s assume we’ll all be here in twenty years, naturally… On that front, the awkwardly injected elements of the film are sort of hopeful, because it allows me to imagine a world in which they wouldn’t work as well.
New music written for this version of the film is fine, but it does seem akin to the point in the concert where you let the rock star play through stuff on the new album. The new music isn’t bad, and you might even grow to like it as time goes on, but it isn’t what you came for.
And then there’s Will Smith. I’m tempted to give the studio and filmmakers a pass on his casting. There really isn’t a current equivalent to the frenetic energy Robin Williams brought to the role. If they absolutely insisted on remaking the movie—and it appears that they did—they were stuck on the central piece of casting for the movie. Picking Smith offers the viewer a fundamentally different energy. Williams was a pinball, jumping back and forth improbably so much that they were able to create a new character out of some of his improvisations. Will Smith is occasionally funny, but his strength lies much more in the pure charisma. Had they not fed Smith a lot of the same off-the-wall lines that Williams had in the original, it might have worked a lot better. Also, despite coming from music originally, I never escaped the sense that Smith didn’t have the vocal range to overpower the orchestrations. On second thought, I’m not giving them a pass on Smith. I don’t think I can give the entire film a pass.