As usual, the Teaser Trailer of Aladdin suckered me in back around the Holiday Season of 2018 and I had my hopes set up that the remake of one of my all time favorite movies would at the very least seem palatable. Sure, Will Smith would never be able to replicate what Robin Williams did for the original film, the music was probably going to be a touch lesser than the original and there were going to be changes that I didn't agree with, but I'm sure Disney learned their mistakes with Beauty and the Beast and would understand just how much people love the original film and would do it the biggest amount of justice they've ever done one of these films. I know I should have been more skeptical, but I needed to have faith in this film during a really emotionally vulnerable state. I should have guessed that signing on a guy like Guy Ritchie to direct was a terrible move as he hadn't directed anything of excellent quality since Snatch, which came out almost 20 years earlier. I should have also guessed when people were saying that the guy signed on to play Jafar was not only better looking than the guy they signed on to play Aladdin, but was also the wrong choice when Ben Kingsley was sitting there and just perfect to play the part of one of Disney's most famous villains. I should have been put off by how Disney kept celebrating that James Earl Jones would be back to play Mufasa in The Lion King, but Disney could not be bothered to bring back Gilbert Gottfried to play Iago. The fact that Beauty and the Beast itself exists should have warned me that this film was going to be bad. But, while I was going through familial drama and enduring both my mixed feelings towards Kingdom Hearts III and the final season of "Game of Thrones", I had a bit of hope that this film would be good.
I am not permitting myself to make my depression addled self make any judgments about films anymore. This movie is a laborious chore to sit through. The cinematography is scatterbrained, the jokes are stale, the acting is subpar at best and the story ideas and takes on the original movie are just so bad that I genuinely think this is one of the worst big budget Hollywood movies ever made. There is almost nothing I can say about this film that is even remotely positive. Luckily for this, Disney has proceeded to make a film worse than Aladdin, but this one hurts the most because of how much I love the original film. I don't even want to go into this one, but I do have commitments...
Plot: Two children on a ship out to sea harp to their father about hearing a story and their father relents and tells them the tale of the Magic Lamp in the faraway kingdom of Agrabah...
Within this Arabian City lives a thief named Aladdin (Mena Massoud), who must steal to survive. While he is involved in one of his daily jaunts through the streets, he encounters a beautiful young woman whom he surmises was a servant in the palace and is smitten with her. After saving her from an angry merchant and eluding the Palace Guards, the two bond, but she rushes back to the palace when a new suitor for the Princess arrives. Realizing his monkey sidekick Abu stole a valuable piece of jewelry from the woman, Aladdin sneaks into the palace to restore it to her, but is captured in the process of trying to escape.
Aladdin is then introduced to the Grand Vizier of Agrabah, an aspiring sorcerer named Jafar (Marwan Kenzari). Jafar convinces Aladdin that the woman he had interacted with was actually Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott), but advises him that as a commoner, he could not hope to win the Princess without the riches needed. He offers Aladdin the wealth he would need if the street urchin would venture into the deadly Cave of Wonders to fetch for him a mysterious lamp. Aladdin does so and manages to nearly escape the collapsing cave with the help of a flying Magic Carpet, but Jafar double-crosses Aladdin and leaves him to rot in the cave forever, but ultimately fails to realize Abu snatched the Magic Lamp from him before it was too late. While in the cave, Aladdin rubs the lamp and summons the all powerful Genie (Will Smith) that dwells inside. The Genie informs Aladdin that he has the power to grant him three wishes, though Aladdin uses resourcefulness to trick the Genie into freeing him from the cavern without using a wish. When out of the Cave, both Aladdin and Genie inform the other of their most passionate dreams (wooing Princess Jasmine for Aladdin and gaining his freedom for The Genie). After Aladdin promises to use his last wish to free the Genie from his prison, he uses a wish to become Prince Ali in order to hopefully be able to wed Jasmine. But can Jasmine love him for being something he wasn't? Would the Genie be able to help Aladdin act more princely? And would Jafar simply sit idly by and give up on his own ambitions to rule the universe?
What's Wrong?: Where do I even begin with this one? I guess we'll have to start with the changes the film made to the original. They added a bunch of story elements, such as a backstory to Jafar and an expanded role for Jasmine's new handmaiden, but a lot of the things added just don't make any sense. Jafar has this bizarre hatred for the neighboring kingdom where Jasmine's mother was said to have come from. At first, I thought it would be because Jafar has control of the military and could make himself more powerful, but that idea is tossed aside quickly. Then, I thought it would be motivational, like Jafar originally came from there and was cast out some unexplained incident that would motivate him to seek power, but nothing came of it. It was actually comical seeing Jafar so hellbent on destroying a neighboring kingdom to spite Jasmine and the Sultan, but not in the funny way. He just randomly wants to commit genocide on a kingdom and is only thwarted by his last wish technically exposing him to the power of a Genie. Speaking of which, Jafar's defeat in this is the same as in the original movie, but here they make the weird decision to have Genie in on Aladdin's plan to imprison Jafar in a lamp. It was interesting to see the original Genie thinking Aladdin went completely insane as he fed Jafar's ego, but here it makes Jafar just seem less intelligent than most in the room. Which may have been the idea they were after, but that's a terrible way to show it.
There are also plenty of plotholes in the film if you just disregard the whole Jafar wants to destroy kingdoms thing. One of the most egregious ones is that while transforming Aladdin into a prince, the Genie tells him that he made it so that no one in Agrabah would recognize him upon his arrival, but less than a few hours in Jafar recognizes him, which makes things all the more confusing as Jafar simply doesn't just storm into Aladdin's chambers and steal the lamp then, but instead recycles the trope of Jafar having Aladdin drowned to get him out of the way. Did he not realize that if Aladdin had indeed been a prince, it would have started a war with a foreign nation if a murder attempt was discovered? Also, the whole mistaken identity thing with Jasmine at the beginning where she pretends she isn't the Princess is kind of strange to me, especially when she's in the Palace. It worked for the original movie because the reveal was made at the precise time Aladdin was arrested by the guards on Jafar's orders. Here, it's just bizarre. But it adds a few "comedic" aspects to the story, so whatever.
The casting of this film is seriously hit and miss. The fact that Disney fans were in uproar about someone other than James Earl Jones playing Mufasa or Danny DeVito playing Phil in the remake of Hercules, but we can't have Gilbert Gottfried come back to play Iago? Alan Tudyk's Iago is barely a character worth mentioning, as the only times he ever talks is to himself or to Jafar. His performance is way too much like an actual parrot instead of the loudmouthed sidekick to one of Disney's most famous villains. Mena Massoud is a tolerable Aladdin, though I will admit the whole modern day speech in a fairy tale thing is starting to grate on my last nerves, the original film included. But the crown jewel for bad performances comes from Marwan Kenzari's performance as Jafar. I thought Disney would do these villains a bit of justice after both Cate Blanchett and Idris Elba did great in their roles as Lady Tremaine and Shere Khan in the remakes of Cinderella and The Jungle Book. I thought that the awful portrayal of Gaston by Luke Evans was going to be a blip on the radar and that Disney would nail their villains from this point on. Kenzari would have been a serviceable guard or servant to Jafar, but he lacks basically everything that made Jafar such an awesome villain in the original Aladdin. He does not have the chilling voice, the sinister cackle or even the fiendish ambitions of one of Disney's greatest villains. He is just horribly miscast here. Do you know who would have made an excellent Jafar? Ben Kingsley? Why didn't Disney just contact him to be Jafar after he was a solid Bagheera? I don't know...
The orchestrations for the songs are also pretty terrible. While I appreciated the work done to "Arabian Nights" to make it a more robust and mysterious opening number for the film, the work done on "Friend Like Me", "Prince Ali" and "A Whole New World" are definitely below quality. This isn't the fault of Alan Menken entirely, but it's clear that the hip hop style of songs that Will Smith was best known for doesn't gel well with the clearly meant for Broadway and Musical styled numbers of the original. It's particularly jarring considering that I thought Naomi Scott did great as a singing voice for Jasmine, it's just that the song was too "popish" for my liking.
Speaking of Jasmine, this film does her a very ironic disservice in this film. Jasmine is given a power ballad in this film about how she no longer wishes to be kept silent by the oppressive and male dominated kingdom of Agrabah. She sings the first version of it after being ridiculed by Jafar for speaking her mind, but then her big moment is after Jafar seizes control of Agrabah and demands her obedience. Jasmine defiantly sings her otherwise okay song, but the moment her song ends, Jafar threatens to kill her father if she doesn't shut up and get in line, which she does immediately. Way to prove that you have no respect for the women you are trying to pander to. First in this film then in Frozen II, it's just comical how Disney missed the bar here. It's genuinely hilarious to see a company preach how it's supportive of feminism and feminist ideals, only to have Jasmine revert quickly back into a Damsel in Distress waiting for Aladdin to save the day.
The film is horrifically unfunny. While I'm sure having both Robin Williams and Gilbert Gottfried in the original film more than made up the comedy end, this film does not have that benefit. They constantly reuse the same jokes and overplay them, such as Iago squawking at Jafar about being the "second" best person in Agrabah or an entire segment dedicated just to the word "jams". I haven't seen an allegedly funny film bomb this badly since Jack and Jill.
Finally, I have to say something about the editing. The film is clearly edited to be more like a cartoon than either Dumbo or Beauty and the Beast were. But with the clearly live action scenes, it simply looks odd. This is especially prevalent in the "One Jump Ahead" scene, where they clearly edit Aladdin and Jasmine to be moving at the speeds a cartoon character would run, but then fast edit's it back to normal speed so the two could still be singing the song at the same time as doing the actions. If you're going to try to evoke the cartoon origins of the film while also maintaining it's live action integrity, you may as well have just reissued the original film. Or at the very least, imitate what the stage shows of the story have done over the years. The editing is not only visually distracting, but it takes me out of the scene almost as badly as the next Live Action Remake we'll be discussing.
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