‘Aladdin’ delivers a solid adaptation, but with very few surprises

Posted on May 31, 2019

By MARK VIOLA

Disney’s quest to adapt all of its animated classics into live-action remakes continues with “Aladdin,” based on the 1992 film best remembered for the late Robin Williams’ performance as the magical Genie.

This is the second of three such remakes scheduled for this year alone, following March’s “Dumbo” and preceding July’s “The Lion King,” and not including the live-action adaptation of 1955’s “Lady and the Tramp” set for Disney’s online streaming platform Disney+ which will debut later this year.

It feels like I’m repeating myself quite a bit in these reviews, but it bears repeating that Disney has taken several different tacts with these remakes. On one side of the spectrum, the studio seems willing at times to make major story revisions, such as in “Maleficent,” which turned the story of “Sleeping Beauty” on its head (and is getting its own sequel in October), or the aforementioned “Dumbo,” which greatly expanded the story and shifted the story’s point of view to that of the children tending Dumbo. On the other side of the spectrum, we have films that are slavishly loyal to the original story, such as 2017’s “Beauty and the Beast,” which told an almost exact retelling of the 1991 classic, a movie that became the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

As for “Aladdin,” it definitely falls in the latter of the two camps, delivering a near word-for-word live-action recreation of the original animated film. Despite suffering from one of the year’s worst marketing campaigns and with many questioning actor Will Smith’s ability to fill the lamp left by Williams, the resulting movie, directed by Guy Ritchie (“Sherlock Holmes”), is actually quite enjoyable.

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