Ritchie’s approach benefits from that adaptation. In the 27 years since the cartoon was first released, Disney’s “Aladdin” has been reinvented once before as a live-action Broadway musical (a natural, considering the cartoon’s show-tunes-powered format).

If Will Smith’s Genie seems bigger and potentially more powerful than Williams’ did, then the opposite goes for the power-hungry Jafar: Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari may be a handsome alternative to the animated version’s effete vizier, with his pencil moustache and Sophia Loren eyes, but he no longer looms large enough to feel like much of a threat. More importantly, the 1992 movie’s wide-eyed but underwritten Princess Jasmine now has ambitions of her own: As embodied by Naomi Scott, she’s no longer just a beauty to be won by “diamond in the rough” street urchin Aladdin (here played by Mena Massoud), but a restless and frustrated young woman who sees herself as a potential successor to her father the sultan (Navid Negahban). (This framing device also pays off an idea intended for, but never implemented by, the 1992 cartoon, in which it makes sense why the Genie is singing this particular number in human form.) That’s evident from the opening scene, as Smith sings a fresh version of “Arabian Nights” in which the word “chaotic” updates the original song’s culturally insensitive “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home” lyrics. The fact that in 20 years, fewer people will be watching his “Aladdin” than the 1992 cartoon seems to motivate Ritchie (who shares screenplay credit with John August) to make the film reflect the moment. It took Walt Disney Studios the better part of a century to build a library filled with what the world thinks of as animated classics, and less than a decade to pillage that catalog in service of all these entertaining but clearly unnecessary live-action remakes - movies that, from the looks of things, will not stand the test of time, but have proven awfully profitable in the short term. Call it “Aladdin and the Fresh Prince of Ababwa” - which could well have been Ritchie’s pitch for a still largely stereotype-driven project that seems to work best when it’s not directly emulating the cartoon that came before. Instead of casting another white actor to play a character in an Arabian-set story, hyper-kinetic “Sherlock Holmes” director Guy Ritchie goes a different route, inviting Will Smith to bring the cocky hip-hop swagger of his early career to the role, while CG-swelling the actor’s muscles to match. Without Williams, or the near-infinite flexibility of hand-drawn animation, the challenge becomes how to translate such an elastic character to the world of flesh-and-blood actors.

Aladdin old guy