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Straits Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Lilo & Stitch (2025) review: A watered-down version of the original
(From left) Maia Kealoha as Lilo, Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders) and Sydney Agudong as Nani in Disney's live-action adaptation of Lilo & Stitch. PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY Lilo & Stitch (PG) 108 minutes, opens on May 22 ★★☆☆☆ The story: In this live-action adaptation of the beloved 2002 Disney animated film, six-year-old Native Hawaiian girl Lilo (Maia Kealoha) lives with her older sister Nani ( Sydney Agudong ) following their parents' death. When a fugitive extraterrestrial created by Dr Jumba Jookiba (Zach Galifianakis) crash-lands on Earth, Lilo adopts the blue creature from an animal shelter, believing it to be a dog, and names it Stitch (Chris Sanders). This remake of the cherished story about two outcasts finding each other unfortunately treats the original's most compelling elements as blemishes to be scrubbed away. The science-fiction thrills and genuine sense of danger have vanished. Also missing are the memorable songs and scenes depicting Stitch as nearly demonic in his destructive impulses. The once-chaotic alien is now merely high-spirited, transformed from an uncontrollable force of nature into something resembling a poorly parented child needing discipline. The zany 2002 film understood that children's movies need breathing room, pauses that allow audiences to experience a child's wonderment as the world reveals its secrets. This frantic do-over never slows down to allow such moments, instead desperately filling every second with jokes that feel blandly anachronistic, as if written by defrosted 1980s sitcom writers. Adding insult to injury is the distractingly obvious product placement. Talented performers are squandered here. Galifianakis as Stitch's creator and the skilled Billy Magnussen as Agent Pleakley have little opportunity to showcase their comedic abilities. (From left) Sydney Agudong as Nani, Maia Kealoha as Lilo and Stitch in Disney's live-action Lilo & Stitch. PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY The original's charming scenes of aliens awkwardly disguised as tourists have been replaced with safer, high-tech camouflage options. No more cross-dressing. One bright spot is director Dean Fleischer Camp's (Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, 2021) handling of Nani's story, giving appropriate weight to her sacrifice of personal dreams to care for her sister, a reality facing many young caregivers. Both films share the same implausible premise: that a child should keep a potentially dangerous creature of unknown origin as a pet 'because love'. Hot take: The blue alien still has big teeth, but no bite. Given everything modern visual effects could have accomplished, this remake feels disappointingly and aggressively bland. The Assessment (M18) 116 minutes, available on Amazon Prime ★★★★☆ The story: In a future society post-environmental collapse, the population is strictly regulated due to resource scarcity. Childbirth is a privilege, and a couple are assessed on their eligibility over seven days of psychological torment. Alicia Vikander in The Assessment. PHOTO: PRIME VIDEO Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) is a botanist and bioengineer Aaryan (Himesh Patel) designs virtual reality pets. They are a conscientious, lovingly married pair missing only the warmth of a child in their modernist seaside house, in the sterile dystopian world of The Assessment. Virginia (Alicia Vikander) is the official assessor, who moves in for a week to determine their parenting capacity by essentially role-playing a wilful toddler. She pees on a dinner guest and flings food at 'mummy' Mia in temper tantrums, her behaviour increasingly erratic and eventually wildly inappropriate. It is one thing to observe Mia and Aaryan having sex because she says she has to evaluate every aspect of their lives, and quite another to, well, you can imagine once she crawls into bed with 'daddy' Aaryan. What she is doing is testing Mia's and Aaryan's underlying insecurities to break them emotionally. Not since she was an android seducing a hapless programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) in the 2014 British sci-fi flick Ex Machina has Vikander been this manipulative and sinister. Here is another extraordinary performance by the Swedish actress. Olsen and Patel are also very good, reacting with a mix of discombobulation and distress as the black comedy in their unnerving three-hander turns to horror. French music video director Fleur Fortune has made a memorable movie debut. Her chilling parable on invasive state control is all too real at a time when, in the United States, autonomous reproductive rights are under threat anew. Hot take: Who knew planned parenthood could be this disturbing? Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Straits Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Thunderbolts* movie review: A Marvel B-team brings A-grade entertainment
(From left) David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Wyatt Russell and Florence Pugh in Thunderbolts*. PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY At The Movies: Weak superheroes make for strong entertainment in Thunderbolts* Thunderbolts* (PG13) 126 minutes, opens on May 1 ★★★★☆ The story: A group of superheroes with spotty records and shady pasts – Yelena Belova/Black Widow (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell) – reluctantly unite when faced with a threat posed by CIA director and industrialist Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The asterisk in the film's title points to its conditional or provisional nature. Its precise meaning will not be revealed here. Instead, have this takeaway: This is the most emotionally rich Marvel movie to come along in a long time. A decent film-maker can evoke tears with Tony Stark's death in Avengers: Endgame (2019). But it takes talent to wring pathos from a scene in which two lower-ranked Marvel characters talk about the ways they have been hurt. The film's easy-going yet deceptively taut storytelling stands in contrast to the grim and less coherent Captain America: Brave New World (2025), the most recent Marvel outing. As the trailer suggests, Thunderbolts* is a comedy centred on a team of misfits. What is surprising is the number and quality of the jokes, most of which stem from them being painfully aware of their inability to do anything awesome, like fly or shoot webs. As villainess de Fontaine puts it, these are 'antisocial defectives' with B-grade powers, worsened by the emotional baggage they bring to the job. Viewers familiar with their backgrounds through their appearances on the Disney+ spin-off shows will enjoy a richer experience, but that foreknowledge is not essential. Red Guardian, the former Soviet supersoldier, is, aptly , a boisterous bear in human form, trying to bond with wary adoptive daughter, the assassin Yelena (Pugh). Their exchanges crackle with a tense energy. Unusually for a Marvel ensemble work, the cast is stacked with strong character actors, beginning with Harbour and Louis-Dreyfus, who are ably backed by Russell and Stan. Russell is striking as the disgraced former Captain America, now a glorified henchman for de Fontaine, played by Louis-Dreyfus in a role that will have fans of her political satire Veep (2012 to 2019) weep with joy. As de Fontaine, she personifies hypercapitalist America, the beast that swallows superheroes and turns them into products. The veteran actress brings such joie de vivre to the part, it becomes impossible to hate a woman who loves her job so much. Director Jake Schreier, making his Marvel feature debut, handled the middlebrow dramedies Robot & Frank (2012) and Paper Towns (2015), but it is his television work that best represents his ability to balance pathos, comedy and heartfelt emotion. He directed episodes of the cruelly underappreciated comedy Lodge 49 (2018 to 2019), which also starred Russell, as well as the first season of the Emmy-winning Netflix satire Beef (2023). In Beef, the story of a feud taken to monstrous extremes, an ounce of therapy would have prevented a pound of suffering. The same principle applies in this film, except the stakes are much higher. Hot take: Thunderbolts* delivers rare emotional richness through its B-list heroes, proving that often, stronger superpowers lead to weaker storytelling. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
