a wondrous crowd-pleaser that merits its Disneyland provenance

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2019)

Disney's live action rehash of its vast animation cannon unabashedly trades on its multiplex time-honored stories as good scripts are few and far between nowadays, it is a canny strategy and has paid great dividends as yet, ALADDIN, its 1992 cel animation feature is an echt corker, boasting a kaleidoscopic Middle-Eastern folktale of substantive visual sumptuosity, not to mention Robin Williams' transcendent voice work as Genie, which, as this reviewer sees it, among one of the most versatile voice-only performances ever.
Here, Will Smith exultantly assumes Williams' mantle in this live action, bulks ups and sheathed in all-blue warpaint, he brings down the house when actualizing Genie's multifaceted omnipotence and physical transformation at the drop of a hat, but isn't a patch on Williams for his elocution, Smith's uttering rhythm is conspicuously contemporary and self-conscious (the singing part doesn't do him much good, the reworked FRIEND LIKE ME hardly leaves an impact), shy of a freewheeling drollness that makes William's Genie such a deathless godsend.
Directed by Guy Ritchie, literally the last name director one can expect to be tapped into making a family-friendly Disney fare, ALADDIN more or less, hews to the original story, but retrofits a female-empowering upgrade relative to princess Jasmine (a revelatory Naomi Scott), who thumbs her nose at a doofus white-skin suitor (Billy Magnussen, mired in stereotypes and desperately wanting of a breakthrough), belts out the theme song SPEECHLESS with flying colors, and whose glass-ceiling breaking resolve of being a sultan of the desert kingdom Agrabah pays off satisfactorily.
By comparison, Mena Massoud's street-smart, diamond-in-the-rough Aladdin has less powerful vocal register (bespoken by their duet of A WHOLE NEW WORLD), but compensates it with rollicking, puppetry-mimicking dancing routines, and whose disarming geniality will eventually grow on the viewers. In the antagonist post, Marwan Kenzari's vile vizier Jafar is cartoonish, but telegraphing a faintly epicene charisma that may pave the way for Disney's more radical act of creating characters of heterodox diversity (a timely move too), meanwhile, pet monkey Abu, parrot Iago (voiced by Alan Tudyk) and the magic carpet, all being convincingly and anthropomorphically reified by the state-of-the-art computer-generated FX undertaking and have their own moments to shine.
Totally clicking the box of ethnicity-correctness, buffeting audience with its eye-pleasing 3D spectacles and sleek action bravura, Guy Ritchie's ALADDIN is at any rate, a wondrous crowd-pleaser that merits its Disneyland provenance, however, in terms of rejiggering its original template with a more topical, bolder spin, like its predecessors, Kenneth Branagh's CINDERELLA (2015) and Bill Condon's BEAUTY AND BEAST (2017), it tends to rest on its laurels and is stymied by the fear that any change might affront or displease its core audience, between having the cake and eating it, clearly Disney has made a conservative choice, at this point, not even the upcoming THE LION KING (2019) can alter that, unfortunately.