'Lilo & Stitch' live-action remake a nostalgic retelling that misses mark

IT'S easy to eye yet another Disney IP remake and wonder: Why are we doing this again? The latest is a hybrid live-action retelling of 2002's Lilo & Stitch, about a lovably unruly Native Hawaiian girl and the alien “dog” that crash-lands in her life.

- JEN YAMATO

Give it this: it makes the eponymous creature of cuddly mass destruction more adorable than ever, with a fresh coat of CG so photorealistic, you'll itch to reach out and scritch his fuzzy blue fur.

Better yet, an abundance of vitality flows from 8-year-old discovery Maia Kealoha, who makes her acting debut playing the young Lilo with an irresistibly rambunctious charm. In a frantically paced remake so uninterested in veering from the blueprint that it apes the original right down to dialogue, camera moves and the exact same needle drops, it’s the expressive Kealoha, with her ear-piercing shrieks of delight, and Sydney Elizabeth Agudong, excellent as her older sister Nani, who make an argument for this watered-down movie to exist.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp, who milked genuine emotion from an unlikely protagonist in 2021’s Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, opens the film by speeding through a shot-for-shot reenactment of the original prologue.

On a distant planet in a galaxy far, far away (no, not that one), a pint-size kaiju genetically engineered for mayhem and dubbed “Experiment 626” escapes from the authorities who have declared him a dangerous abomination.