Movie Review: ‘Lilo & Stitch,’ a sweet but unnecessary live-action remake
The six-legged alien Stitch from “Lilo & Stitch” doesn’t choose to be bad. He’s just genetically programed that way. Kind of like the way Disney is apparently programmed these days to strip mine its old animated stories to make poor live-action remakes.
So here comes the sweet but utterly unnecessary “Lilo & Stitch” of 2025, which carefully apes almost every detail of the 2002 original but then goes all Hollywood at the end with over-the-top explosions, the addition of a CIA team and Tom Cruise-level heroics, maybe to try to compete with the latest “Mission: Impossible” opening at the same time.
“What deranged maniac would create something like this?” asks the head of the Galactic Federation about Stitch but they could easily refer to whoever at Disney green-lit this lazy cash grab that assumes we won’t remember the original, wastes the comic zip of Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen and product-places Capri Sun.
Screenwriters Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes are credited with the new story but it’s built on the work of the original’s Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, right down to swiping whole chunks of dialogue, the same structure and same characters.
Disney’s live-action remakes/re-imaginings have been a staple for more than a decade, with titles raided again including “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “The Jungle Book,” “Mulan,” “Dumbo,” “Pinocchio” and “Snow White.” Here’s hoping “Lilo & Stitch” convinces the studio to generate some new stories.
Our heroine here is Lilo, a 6-year-old lonely Native Hawaiian girl who is shunned and bullied by her peers. She shoves back, pouts and adores Elvis. She is played winsomely by Maia Kealoha. “Am I bad?” Lilo asks her sister. The reply: “You’re not bad. You just do bad things sometimes.”
Sydney Elizabeth Agudong artfully plays her older sister and mother figure, trying to keep the siblings afloat after the death of their parents. The filmmakers have beefed up the older sister’s story with her yearning to be a marine biologist. Agudong proves a soulful sister, playing a ukulele, singing and surfing.
Stitch — voiced again by Sanders — is the product of an illegal genetic experimentation in a far-off galaxy who can think faster than a supercomputer. He is built to destroy, like a reverse E.T. (Love will tame him, of course.) Stitch is faithfully realized, right down to his fur and koala bear nose.
Turning the 2002 animated movie into live-action has meant the two aliens tasked with tracking down the escapee Stitch use cloning technology to become humans — enter Galifianakis and Magnussen. The technology has also denuded their comedic chops, leaving them just two bumbling doofuses.
Tia Carrere, who voiced the older sister in the first film, takes over as social services case worker from Ving Rhames, only this time friendlier and helpful. Courtney B. Vance plays a new character — a CIA officer who investigates aliens and, in this case, chooses a hairball alien over his training, his nation and the truth.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp, the filmmaker behind the animated feature film “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” proves adept at mixing humans and digital creations and revels in the anarchic excesses of Stitch. But the violence — lasers, forks in blenders, a house burned down — is unnecessary.
“Lilo & Stitch” is really a story about sisters and how families can be dysfunctional but still work as long as there’s love. That message thankfully hasn’t been diluted in the remake despite being overloaded with temporal portals, a Jet Ski chase and an overwrought conclusion. Disney should have left the original alone.
“Lilo & Stitch,” a Walt Disney Studios release that hits theaters Friday, is rated PG for “action, peril and thematic elements.” Running time: 148 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.