In the meet-cute scene, he has Aladdin and Jasmine feed starving orphans at the expense of an understandably grumpy baker, expressing an aristocrat’s preference for twinkling crooks over dull working people that’s been part of the Ritchie shtick since the Lock, Stock days.
Even Sabu, as far back as the 1930s, was allowed to have an Indian accent.ĭirector Guy Ritchie comes to this after putting his own spin on Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur, and is at least invested in the story of a rascally thief and a socially conscious princess.
ALADDIN OLD GUY TEETH SKIN
As with Favreau’s Mowgli, the casting ethos has advanced to the point when performers with the right skin tones get to play Middle Eastern or Asian characters… but only if their line readings sound straight from 1950s white-bread American suburbia. Massoud’s parkour-practising Aladdin and Naomi Scott’s glass-ceiling-smashing Princess Jasmine aren’t really allowed space to develop readings of the roles when Smith is due to pop out of a lamp at any moment to murder a song or flog a comedy routine. And he misses a trick when the villain makes a bland statement – “I wish only for glory for the kingdom of Agrabah” – that could easily be counted as one of his wishes. He tells Aladdin (Mena Massoud) that he can’t wish for more wishes, yet grants Jafar’s wish to become a sorcerer – which, in essence, is the same thing. Though CGI-ed into a blue-skinned, smoke-below-the-waist special effect, Smith – who does double duty as the teller of the tale in a frame sequence – spends much of the film in human form, involved in his own love-interest subplot and breaking several of the ‘rules’ of the story in order to nudge things along to a happy ending. That debt carries on here, with Will Smith’s genie looking and acting more like Rex Ingram in Korda’s film than the cartoon voiced by Robin Williams. The cartoon Aladdin (1992), directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, owed a great deal to Alexander Korda’s version of The Thief of Bagdad (1940), to the extent of borrowing its villain ( Conrad Veidt’s sorcerer Jafar) and replacing the ‘new lamps for old’ business with special-effects sorcery.
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