The Live-Action Lilo & Stitch Movie is Surprisingly Non-Terrible!

Unlike Snow White, it is not an abomination!

If you look very closely at the background of Lilo and Stitch, you can see Tom Cruise performing death-defying stunts. Sometimes he’s leaping out of an airplane without a parachute. In other scenes, he’s wrestling a very angry, very large grizzly bear.

I hear that in the latest and final entry in the series, Ethan Hunt embarks on a truly impossible mission: finding an honest politician!

Cruise isn’t credited in either film. He wasn’t even compensated. He just heard that the movies would be opening around the same time as Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and decided he’d help out a little.

The man loves movies! It’s insane! He’s insane! Along with Sinners, The Minecraft Movie, and the commercial where Nicole Kidman gushes about the glory of the theatrical experience, Tom Cruise is single-handedly keeping film alive.

Lilo and Stitch is doing its part as well by making a fuck-ton of money during its opening weekend. How much money? Over three hundred million dollars worldwide. Lilo & Stitch has only been out for a few days, and it’s already the sixth top-grossing film of the year.

That’s good.

I did not have high expectations for Lilo & Stitch. In my limited experience, live-action remakes of Disney cartoons are a source of dread rather than excitement.

In a mercenary movie world where everything successful and beloved is recycled endlessly and exhaustively, these retreads are even more arbitrary than most.

My son and I left Mufasa after about half an hour, not because it was egregiously awful, but rather because it was so goddamn unnecessary.

Mufasa is Pinocchio compared to Snow White, although it annoys me that I now have to specify that I’m referring to the famously grim 1940 animated masterpiece, not Robert Zemeckis’ poorly received 2022 remake.

The live-action prequel to The Lion King annoyed me because its characters are CGI, which is close enough to animation to make the “live-action” tag feel vaguely dishonest. Mufasa isn’t terrible, just redundant.

Snow White was much worse. It disastrously rendered the dwarves in CGI, a way that brought audiences back to the bad old days of the Uncanny Valley, when CGI came just close enough to recreating real life to be pure nightmare fuel.

The infamous flop attempted to update the film’s class and racial elements in a manner that only underscored how unpalatable the story is to contemporary audiences.

It might seem pointless to remake a movie that is only a little over two decades old, but a story from 2002 thankfully does not need to be extensively retooled to avoid offending modern sensibilities.

As someone who grew up on Steven Spielberg-directed or produced creature features from the late 1970s and 1980s, I appreciated Lilo & Stitch’s throwback quality.

It’s another endearing account of an unlikely friendship between a cuddly creature and an ordinary child, but here the moppet in question is Lilo Pelekai, a six-year-old Hawaiian girl with the requisite dead parents and tragic backstory.

This is in sharp contrast to the 1980s, when, pop-culture-wise, everyone was white. Lilo is a wild child being raised by her tough but loving older sister, Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong).

The decision to set the film in Hawaii does not feel arbitrary or forced. Like Encanto, Turning Red, and Moana, Lilo & Stitch benefits from cultural specificity and a grounding in a non-white culture. I really hope that the unfortunate rightwing shift in American life and pop-culture does not lead to Disney giving up on diversity, equity and inclusion. They’ve made the studio and its films better, just as they make life better as well.

Lilo and Nani struggle in their parents’ absence. Tia Carrere, who voiced Nani in the 2002 original, plays a social worker who checks up on the sisters.

Elsewhere in the universe, alien scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba is in trouble for illegally creating Experiment 626, a creature that resembles a blue alien panda.

Experiment 626 is sentenced to exile, but he purloins a ship and crash-lands it on Earth. Dr. Jumba (played in human disguise by Zack Galifianakis, who you might remember from that three-year stretch a while ago when he appeared in every movie) and his earth-loving associate Agent Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) are dispatched to Hawaii to retrieve Experiment 626, who very much does not want to be found.

Due to his vague resemblance to a canine, Experiment 626 ends up in a pound where Lilo adopts him and renames him Stitch.

Stitch is a rampaging id. He’s uncontrollable, feral, a force for destruction. He’s utterly uninhibited and unrestrained, a feral creature who defiantly refuses to be tamed.

In that respect, he’s a kindred spirit with Lilo, who eight-year-old actress Maia Kealoha plays with tremendous charm and a winning lack of precociousness.

Stitch is E.T. with a Looney Tunes personality. He’s a cross between the beloved star of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic and the Tasmanian Devil. To put things in Gremlins terms, he has Gizmo’s adorability and Stripe’s appetite for destruction.

Stitch is a hurricane of destruction who takes great joy in mischief.

The titular alien doesn’t just laugh at his own antics; he cackles with glee. He’s anarchy personified, a whirling dervish.

This makes him an anomaly in the laid-back new world that he finds himself in. He’s the proverbial bull in a china shop.

Lilo & Stitch thrives on the chemistry between its title characters. They’re orphans alone in the world who find in each other something essential. They may be from different planets, but what they share is more important than what separates them.

This takes some surprisingly dark turns. It opens in the endless shadow of the deaths of Lilo’s parents and takes Stitch to the brink of death without (spoilers) the little bastard actually dying.

Lilo & Stitch runs out of steam in its third act, but for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised. This may not have a strong reason to exist outside of commerce, but it’s the rare live-action remake of an animated film that justifies its existence.

It’s not great art, but it is a reasonably good time, which is about as much as you can expect from a commercial enterprise like this.

Three and a half stars