Enjoyable, but not unique and somewhat disappointing from a nostalgic perspective.

Rating: 6/10 (27 August 2019)

While enjoyable, and definitely fresh for children/adults who have never seen the original, as someone who grew up with the original Aladdin, and it being one of my favorite movies as a child, I couldn't help but be left with a certain sense of disappointment from this version. I'm ordinarily a huge Will Smith fan, but he just didn't fit the role of the genie for me. Will Smith is many things, but a Disney song singer he is not, and as a result the songs sounded a bit whiny/nasally, and just over emphasized based on his vocal abilities. More importantly though, I would have liked to see them put a bit of a fresh spin on the original story line, not to make it better but to make it their own. You're welcome to not agree with that, and prefer to have it closely resemble the original, but the one thing I can't agree with would be how eerily similar Will Smith portrayed the genie as compared to Robin Williams' version so long ago. For me, out of respect for the great character Robin Williams created for the genie, watching Will Smith try and exactly duplicate the mannerisms and comedy of the original was simply...uncomfortable to watch. If in no other respect, I would have minimally preferred to see the genie character be it's own new spin on it, and at most feel like it was paying homage to the original rather than be a exact but sub par duplication. Do I know what that would have looked like? No. But I'm not a director/producer, so it's not my job to know what that would look like. Like I said, if you haven't seen the original and are being introduced to Aladdin for the first time, this movie is fine and enjoyable. But if you're very familiar with the original, this isn't going to introduce anything new, and frankly the cartoon was able to be way more entertaining in many respects. Take the character of Iago for example; in the cartoon he had complex facial expressions and dramatic flair, whereas in this version he's just a bird that flies from point A to B. And if you were a Robin Williams fan, and are familiar with his unique comedic genre, Will Smith's version of the genie is going to feel like you're watching a Vegas strip lookalike attempt to stand in a shadow that he just can't come close to filling.