Forget and leave behind this dreadful take on Lilo & Stitch

The year’s second “live-action” remake from Disney goes after a film less historic or respected than Snow White, but one nonetheless sapped of its manic magic by the creatively bankrupt process: Lilo & Stitch. The story of a rowdy little Hawaiian orphan and her destructive, crash-landed pet alien contrasted two imaginative shades of youthful energy (who hasn’t momentarily seen a younger sibling or child as a monster hellbent on pure chaos?) with a graceful watercolor depiction of their island community. Aliens and tourists were both fish out of water, both disruptive to locals just trying to keep their jobs and houses intact. A loving sisterly core kept things grounded and eventually soothed the blue beast. Those beats are all, mostly, repeated diligently in the cheap-looking remake, plodded through with the slo-mo energy of an underwater march. If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.

Watching a filmmaker’s worse version of a movie that already exists is like eating a cookie from an amateur baker. They might technically follow the recipe, but it’s hard not to spend the experience remembering how good things could be. The second fiction feature from Marcel The Shell With Shoes On‘s Dean Fleischer Camp, Lilo & Stitch proves the director can obey instructions and cash a check, but little else. His film tamps down the endearing strangeness of Lilo (Maia Kealoha, mostly flat and sometimes less intelligible than her blue companion), the sci-fi fun of Stitch’s alien creators/pursuers, and the wacky mayhem of juggling life, children, and pets from outer space. 

The plot is effectively the same. Lilo is struggling to fit in after her parents’ death. Stitch (original director Chris Sanders) is on the run from an alien governmental body, disguising himself poorly as a dog. The former adopts the latter at an animal shelter, and they embrace each other even as they cause problems for those around them. “‘Ohana” means “family,” after all, a tearjerking sentiment which this film warps into a ubiquitous refrain. There’s Elvis music, surfing, and frozen treats falling on the ground. The majority of the remake has the janky fidelity of a community theater production, a fan film going through the motions as best it can.

So, what does this new take on Lilo & Stitch add? A few more humans get in the way of anything fun: A straightfaced social worker played by Tia Carrere makes the intimidating punchline Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance) redundant, while Amy Hill hams it up as Lilo’s elderly neighbor. Lilo’s sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) shoulders more of the story’s focus, having turned down a college scholarship to better care for Lilo, which gives the narrative an odd angle; the plot’s trajectory leads to how Nani can get away from Lilo and the responsibilities she brings—this is a film inclined to dump Lilo off on friends and neighbors so that Nani can go live her life, something that would feel more in line with the found-family themes of the original if any of the other human characters were more than warm bodies.