Did you ever wonder what Lilo & Stitch would look like if it was live-action, a lot longer and not quite as good? If you did, you’re thinking like a Disney executive. The House of Mouse has been chewing away at its own foundations for nearly two decades now and it’s found something else to gnaw on. The 2002 animated classic was practically perfect, and at a lean 85 minutes it’s still a testament to storytelling efficiency. The new live-action remake is more like a testament to low ambition: If it ain’t broke, and if you have no new perspective on the material, it’ll be completely pointless but maybe it won’t suck.
Sure enough, the new “Lilo & Stitch” does not suck, and if the original film never existed the remake’s flaws might be less obvious. As directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, whose debut feature “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” is one of the best Disney movies Disney would never make anymore, this version takes the plot and a lot of the dialogue from the original and stretches it out, turning one interesting character into two boring ones and tossing in a portal gun from that one video game series; you know, the one with the portals (I’ll remember the title eventually, I think it has something to do with portals). “Lilo & Stitch” mostly gets away with it. I guess when you take something that works and make it work slightly less, it still kinda works.
“Lilo & Stitch” stars Maia Kealoha as Lilo, a little girl living in Hawaii with her older sister, Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), because their parents died. (Curse that Disneyitis!) Lilo is a little monster and she wrecks everything she touches, but all the best monsters are suffering from a wounded heart, so you love them anyway. When Lilo meets a strange blue dog at an animal shelter she immediately adopts it, because it’s just as weird and calamitous and unappreciated as she is.
There’s just one problem. The dog isn’t a dog, it’s a rogue genetic experiment from beyond the stars who was created for just one purpose: total annihilation. Stitch, as Lilo eventually calls him, escapes space cop custody (ASCAB) and crash lands in Hawaii, where he’s horrified to discover there’s not much to annihilate. So he hangs out with Lilo, hiding from his mad scientist creator Dr. Jumba Jookiba (Zach Galifianakis) and a cyclopean Earth expert Agent Pleakley (Billy Magnussen). Stitch’s pursuers use holograms to look like the human actors who play them, which probably saved Disney a lot of money but also let’s be fair, it’s harder for strange cartoon aliens to blend in with humans when the humans aren’t also cartoons.
Rounding out the cast are Mrs. Keokoa (Tia Carrere, who voiced Nani in the original), a social worker who worries Nani might not be a suitable guardian, and Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance), a C.I.A. agent trying to prove aliens are real. In the original movie Mrs. Keokoa and Cobra were the same character, which meant Lilo’s social worker was a fascinatingly out of place tough guy whose C.I.A. background was an amusing, satisfying last-minute reveal. While it’s always nice to see both Tia Carrere and Courtney B. Vance in a movie, and I can appreciate coming up with an excuse to cast them both, splitting a one great character into two forgettable characters isn’t likely to be taught in screenwriting classes anytime soon. It turns out the opposite of dovetailing is just cutting a dove in half.
The changes to “Lilo & Stitch” are arbitrary and add nothing to the material, but they also don’t hurt the movie much. The story of two outcasts finding each other, wreaking a little havoc, and proving they both have good hearts works in any medium, even when it’s clunky. Dean Fleischer Camp enlisted excellent actors for this film, and that goes a long way towards overcoming the many little flaws.
Maia Kealoha matches Stitch’s chaos gremlin energy at every turn, and it’s hard not to admire her moxie. Sydney Elizabeth Agudong carries a lot of the film on her back, delivering a heartfelt and committed performance. As in the original, Stitch is voiced by his co-creator Chris Sanders, whose fascinating and oddly emotional and complex gobbledygook clearly precurses those Minions everybody loves these days. (To paraphrase Ekolu Kalama’s 2012 single: “You deserve a royalty… from (despicable) me.”) Together they all make the film’s emotional moments resonate. It’s hard not to be moved by the movie’s familiar but lovely conclusion.
Disney has produced worse live-action remakes of their beloved films. A lot worse. Oh God, so many of them are worse. Some of them are only slightly better than getting stabbed in the eyes. (I’m looking at you, Robert Zemeckis’s “Pinocchio.”) But this new “Lilo & Stitch” gets the job done. It’s just a job nobody needed to do. It’s like hiring a body shop to fix a brand new car, so the mechanics can only justify their paycheck by denting the fender themselves and then knocking it back in place. It’s not the filmmakers’ fault they dinged it. Disney couldn’t tell what they had was perfect to begin with.
“Lilo & Stitch” opens exclusively in theaters on May 23.
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