Movie Review: Aladdin (2019)

Aladdin (2019)

Director: Guy Ritchie

Starring: Will Smith, Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari, Navid Negahban, Nasim Pedrad, Billy Magnussen

Rating: PG

Runtime: 128 minutes

I grew up on Disney. As a child (and indeed well into my adolescence), I watched Disney incredibly often. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, Tangled, these are just a brief selection of the films that I could recite the events to you verbatim. But of all the Disney films I watched as a child, none of them stuck with me quite as much as the original 1992 Aladdin did. The combination of a absolutely magnificent soundtrack and Robin Williams entranced me as a child and is still magnificently entertaining to this day.

When Disney announced that they were doing a live-action Aladdin, I was extremely curious. Once they released the first trailer, I was horrified. Quite what had they done to the Genie? So I went into Aladdin with the creeping worry that it would just turn out like every other live-action Disney remake (having watched Dumbo a month or so prior to this, my worries were amplified tenfold), a horrendous mess not worthy of the title of the film it is a remake of.

As it turns out, I had every reason to be worried about this film.

The plot is the exact same as the original film, so there’s little need to dive into it. Aladdin falls in love with a princess, finds a lamp for an evil sorcerer, unleashes a genie that offers him three wishes and hijinks occur as Aladdin tries to use his wishes to court the princess. Jafar, the evil sorcerer, gets the lamp and goes insane with power before Aladdin and Jasmine defeat him and free the genie. So so far, the same old deal. The difference comes with the fact they’ve added around half an hour of extra runtime, so the pacing just completely dies. They’ve attempted to add a half-baked love story into the equation for Genie, but it just doesn’t work in the slightest.

And the acting is….. well, there’s at least one good actor in this mess of a film. Will Smith really is pretty solid as the Genie, if he isn’t a patch on Robin Williams. His version of “Friend Like Me” in particular, stuck out as one of the best moments of this film. Not quite on the level of the original, but it’s also going for something completely different. But everything else ranges from mediocre to abysmal. On the end of mediocre, we have Naomi Scott’s Jasmine, who simply isn’t as compelling as she should be. It’s a story about somebody first encountering the outside world, yet she just feels like yet another person. On the abysmal end of the scale, we have Mena Massoud’s Aladdin and Marwan Kenzari’s Jafar. Massoud simply doesn’t have the charm and wit that is needed for a character such as Aladdin, and he’s got absolutely zero chemistry with Scott which makes “A Whole New World fall” almost completely flat. As for Kenazri, he’s simply not scary enough. Jafar is supposed to be utter, terrifying evil, but he’s more laughable in this than anything else.

Aladdin is a mess of a film, but it’s not without a few high points. However, the addition of a new song (which is awful, by the way) messes up the pacing somewhat and causes the film to drag a fair bit in its latter act. It’s such a shame since it’s obvious that with a few tweaks this film could have actually been quite good. Oh, and can somebody please stop Guy Ritchie from using so much slow motion? Thanks in advance.

In the end, this is less “A Whole New World” and more Same Old World, but a bit worse. Not quite as catchy, is it?