A Decent Aladdin Remake? You Wish
Thank God for Will Smith. The beats of Disney’s new live action remake of Aladdin are all pretty much unrevised and familiar from the 1992 animated classic. A street urchin named Aladdin steals food and gets chased through the streets by a royal guard; then he saves a princess disguised as a civilian, and gets wrapped up in a cute tale of love, loyalty, a treacherous Grand Vizier named Jafar, and a rambunctious blue genie with a few show-stopping tunes up his manacled sleeves. But despite its familiarity, something is amiss in Guy Ritchie’s soapy, bland rehash. The original Aladdin was just over an hour and a half long. The new one is a sleepy 128 minutes—which means that you can sense when the movie is dragging and missing its previously well-honed marks. When you’re wondering why the songs and pictures onscreen just don’t seem to pop the way they once did; when you can’t quite figure out what it is that the new film’s flesh-and-blood stars, Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott, seem to...