Aladdin (2019)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
A kindhearted street urchin named Aladdin embarks on a magical adventure after finding a lamp that releases a wisecracking genie while a power-hungry Grand Vizier vies for the same lamp that has the power to make their deepest wishes come true.
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9 films that influenced Aladdin
What critics say influenced Aladdin
With that in mind, the least the film division can do is not rely too heavily on the nostalgia tied to these well-loved tales, a reliance that leads to products such as the 2017 live-action “Beauty and the Beast,” an eyesore and weak echo of its animated self, rather than a “Cinderella” – which fine-tuned the magic of the 2D 1950s classic with some 2015 character adjustments to help modernize it for new viewers.
There's a reason Disney has tapped James Earl Jones to reprise the role of Mufasa in its forthcoming "The Lion King" remake; who else could thrive in the shadow of that voice?
Watching Aladdin , I was reminded that he turned down Django Unchained, which was written specifically for him by one of the finest screenwriters of the age, so he could instead direct his energies to Men in Black III .
For Smith to not "hear" the problem implicit in his casting as a slave is astonishing, especially given his famous rejection of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained for not foregrounding the slave experience.
Ritchie is more toned down here than his early works, or more recent big-budget work on Sherlock Holmes or King Arthur, but the bursts of slow-mo, hyper-quick edits, and other flashes don’t add much.
When it doesn’t work, however, it doesn’t work badly , as evidenced by 2017’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword , a misshapen and clumsy attempt to give the legendary Knight of the Round Table a Lock, Stock -esque origin story on a monsters-and-magic blockbuster scale.
It’s a damn shame to see Ritchie go from something like King Arthur to this, as it felt, at least, that he gave a shit there.
After the dismal debacle of his previous feature King Arthur , Guy Ritchie directs with such humour and flair that you half suspect that he must have been rubbing the magic lantern himself and getting some help behind the camera from the Genie.
I would be very curious to know who at Disney saw Ritchie’s King Arthur and decided, “Yes, we’re on the right track.”
Now, most right-thinking people would have been wary to learn that the director of Aladdin is Guy Ritchie, whose particular brand of gangsta machismo courses through films such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels , Snatch , RocknRolla , Sherlock Holmes , The Man from U.N.C.L.E and the godawful King Arthur .
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Smith’s Genie, always reliable for a wisecrack, harkens back to previous anthropomorphic depictions of social subservience and alter-ego psyche — from Mark Twain’s Nigger Jim to Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and the black crows in Dumbo to Eddie Murphy voicing the serpent in Mulan and the donkey in Shrek, all products of the American romantic imagination.
When the Genie transforms himself into a human, it’s all well and good; when he’s CG, the effect calls to mind the uncomfortable qualities of Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.
The dance scenes and outfits are mostly influenced by Indian designs and Bollywood styles; the military armor looks like leftovers from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven.
The primary architect of that design is John August, a fellow USC alum who has been an inspiration to many of us since his days of Go and Big Fish (I religiously listen to his podcast, Scriptnotes ).
Smartly, Ritchie, working from a script he co-wrote with John August (“Dark Shadows,” “Big Fish”), does not stray far from the original material.
Written by John August (“Big Fish”) and rewritten by Ritchie, with music and songs by Alan Menken (and the late Howard Ashman) plus a couple of original tunes intended to qualify the film for Best Original Song Oscars, the film is unfortunately a perfect illustration of an observation by Josh Raby, summing up this era of both Disney features and computer animation: “Using CGI to turn expressive animated films into photoreal reboots feels like using a magic wand to make a toaster.”
The structure of the story, in a script by John August (“Big Fish”) and Ritchie that sticks closely to the ’92 version, introduces the “street rat” Aladdin (Mena Massoud) trying to live by his wits on the hard streets of Agraba.
Directed by Guy Ritchie (“Snatch”), who co-wrote the screenplay with John August (“Big Fish”), Disney’s new take on “Aladdin” gets a fresh new framing device, with Will Smith as a mariner relating to his two children the magical story of Aladdin (multitalented charmer Mena Massoud), the nimble thief with the heart of gold, and his adventures with his pet monkey Abu, a magic carpet and an all-powerful Genie (also Smith).
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First, however, there’s Aladdin (Mena Massoud) to get to know: a kind-hearted street kid with a panache for stealing and a knack for parkour that seems ripped out of the otherwise charmless “Assassin’s Creed.”
The prolific female team of production designer Gemma Jackson ( Finding Neverland ) and set decorator Tina Jones ( Assassin’s Creed ) created expansively hued settings of showy detail.