Metacritic reviews

It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.

Smith puts on such an outsized performance that it’s easy for him to overshadow its smaller joys — and when Genie is suddenly silenced in a limp third act, the entire film suffers.

The original Aladdin was an innovative motion picture, heralding a new era of CG-assisted animation and celebrity stunt-casting. It was bold and exciting. The remake rehashes the original in a pleasing but perfunctory way.

When Aladdin gets it right, it propels you high on a magic-carpet ride. But the odd bum note thrusts you straight out of Arabia and back into your cinema seat.

Ultimately, this is a rollicking adventure that will enchant young audiences. It’s just a shame that its odd creative missteps tend to linger in the memory once the magic has faded.

Another lavish and largely entertaining Disney re-do, with strong turns from Massoud and Scott. But, appropriately for someone playing a huge, powerful entity trapped in a tiny ornament, Smith’s genie performance feels disappointingly constrained — both by overdependence on the original and some ghastly CGI.

Despite Aladdin’s occasionally arresting moments, this remake’s most potent element is its intentional air of déjà vu.

No one really needs this mostly middling, fitfully funny and never unpleasant movie. And the movie itself seems cheerfully aware of that fact as it deftly lifts lines, beats, characters and songs from its 1992 predecessor, every so often punching up the comedy, wrinkling the plot and injecting a dash of politically corrective subtext.

The ever-quickening half-life of pop culture has gotten so short that we’ve now officially entered the era of diminishing returns. It’s the new normal. What’s old is new again — but not quite as good as you remembered it. Aladdin is…fine, but it has no real reason for being beyond, you know, capitalism. A whole new world, it’s not.

The nicest thing I can say about 2019’s Aladdin is in its best moments it reminded me of a movie I liked a lot as a kid.